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Clay MacCauley 
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CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY 



It is the historical task of Christianity to assume with every 
succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis, and to be for 
ever spiritualizing more and more her under- 
standing of the Christ. 

t - Henri Frederic AmieL 



1891 



P R E FACE. 



The first three of the following articles are, 
with some changes, letters written by me to 
the " Japan Mail" at intervals during the past 
few weeks, in reply to a sermon preached in 
Tok3 r o, by the Bishop of the Church of 
England in Japan. Dr. Bickersteth, with 
especial intent to guard Christian believers 
against what he designates "the assaults to 
w r hich Christianity is now exposed" in Japan, 
classed among the assailants of Christianity, 
the body of religious believers and workers 
called Unitarians. I should not, however, 
have felt it incumbent upon me to take public 
notice of Dr. Bickersteth's discourse, had he 
not, in this exercise of his episcopal functions, 
and by newspaper publication, pronounced two 
judgments of grave import upon those who 
bear the Unitarian name : 

First, that Unitarians are not entitled to the 
name Christian ; 

Second, that Unitarians no longer maintain 
that the New Testament teaches Unitarianism. 



ii 



PREFACE. 



Moreover, tlie utterances of an ecclesiastic 
so liigli in dignity and authority as Dr. 
Bickersteth, may not, under present circum- 
stances, be ignored. Under present circum- 
stances, I say, for the episcopal sermon was 
but the decisive act in a series of events of a 
like kind from several sources. My reply 
therefore was directed to the Bishop of the 
Church of England chiefly as representing a 
number of the Orthodox Christians of Japan. 
It is my earnest wish that, once and for al- 
ways, if possible, Unitarians and the Orthodox 
Christians of Japan may understand one 
another, and be understood by the Japanese 
people. 

In writing the letters, I believe I was 
wholly free from " hatred and malice and all 
un charitableness." I appreciate — no one, I 
think, appreciates more really, cheerfully or 
gratefully — the Christian truth embodied in 
the orthodox creeds, and the profound religious 
faith held, and beneficent work done, under 
Orthodox Christianity. The odium tkeologicum, 
so deplorable in religious controversy, there- 
fore did not move me. It was my intention 
simply to give so clear a presentation of 
certain characteristics of Unitarianism, that, at 
least, misunderstandings and misstatements 
about it might not be truthfully made current 



PREFACE. 



iii 



or be confirmed, among those who should read 
what I wrote. 

As a lover of peace, as a seeker after union 
among the members of the Church universal, 
and for the sake of harmony in the Christian 
influences exerted upon the people of this 
empire, I deprecate the disturbing effects of 
even apparent dissension among those who 
profess to be animated by the spirit of Christ ; 
but, after all, personal desire may not outweigh 
the claims of justice, nor should fear of arous- 
ing uncertainty and disquiet in others, prevent 
the setting right of a published wrong. 

Since the letters were published, it has 
occurred to me that, were they supple- 
mented by a sketch of the evolution and 
metamorphoses through which Christianity has 
passed from its beginnings, they might still 
better serve their original purpose, and, 
possibly, be of some permanent worth to 
Japanese students of Christian doctrine. Such 
additional matter has been prepared, and, 
with the original letters, is here offered to the 
public. In the illustrative quotations from 
authorities concerning Modern Unitarianism, 
I have drawn but little from the works of 
living writers, for the reason, that I have, at 
present,, access to but few of the many books 
needed to make a representative summary. 



iv 



PREFACE. 



This is the explanation of the absence from 
these pages of the testimony of several well 
known scholars and representative Unitarians. 

A few words here, to make the position of 
Unitarianism yet more intelligible to those 
who may read what I have written, may not be 
out of place by way of preface to this reply. 

Unitarianism is a religions movement, 
Christian in origin and history, but it is 
specifically distinguished among other forms 
of Christianity by the reliance of its advocates, 
for final authority in matters of faith and 
practice, upon the great Protestant principle of 
personal and private judgment. Also, to Uni- 
tarians, Christian truth lies not only in sacred 
tradition but in present thought and life. 
The enlightened and reverent reason, they 
believe, discloses ever growing revelation. By 
the exercise of free historical inquiry, moreover, 
they have come to the conclusion that, 
fundamental in the mind of Jesus of Nazareth, 
was faith in the Fatherhood of God and the 
Brotherhood of Man ; that, essential in the 
life of Jesus, was a sublime realization of 
this faith. The true Christianity, they there- 
fore hold, is in the enlarging and deepening 
consciousness of this faith and in its wider 
and purer realization in life, wherever manifest 
in the course of the history of mankind. In 



PREFACE. 



v 



fact, many Unitarians have accepted, as only 
adequate, a definition of Unitarianism as tlie 
free and progressive development of Christi- 
anity which aspires to to be synonymous with 
universal ethics and universal religion. 

The mission of the American Unitarian 
Association to Japan has been established for 
the purpose of presenting to the Japanese 
people, Christianity, as the universal Gospel 
of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood 
of Man, apprehended and realized in the faith 
and life of Jesus the Christ, illustrated and 
extended by Divine Providence in History, 
and confirmed by maturing Philosophy and 
Science. 

In the preparation of this little book, I 
have gathered material from many stores, 
most of which have been acknowledged by 
name. I am especially indebted to the writ- 
ings of Dr. Joseph H. Allen formerly of the 
Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass., 
Prof. Alexander, V. G. Allen of the Episcopal 
Theological School of Harvard University, 
Prof. Crawford H. Toy of the Harvard Divinity 
School, and Dr. James Martineau of England, 
for several facts and suggestions uncredited. 

With the hope that these pages may serve, 
not only to guard Unitarianism from mistaken 
criticism, but, also, to make clear the forward 



vi 



PREFACE. 



movement of Christianity in History, par- 
ticularly in its successively higher expressions 
of that which has been called the " Faith of 
the Incarnation," I commend what is here 
written, to the people of Japan. 

Clay MacCauley. 

Unitarian Mission, 

Tokyo, Japan. 



Dec. 15. 1891. 



CONTENTS. 



I. 

THE PERSON OF JESUS IN BIBLE 
AND CHURCH. 

Page. 



Introductory 1 

I. 

The Christology of the New Testament ......... 4 

II 

The Christology of the New Testament ; The Logos 

Doctrine 10 

III. 

The Christology of Unitarianism 16 



II. 

GLIMPSES OF THE EVOLUTION 
AND METAMOEPHOSES OF 
CHRISTIANITY. 



THE FIRST CENTURY. 

1. Primitive Christianity in Contemporary History. 

Tacitus. A. D. 54—117 29 

2. The Beginnings of Christianity. Jesus of 

Nazareth. The Synoptic Gospels; The Acts 

of the Apostles. A. D. 30—125 ? 29 



ii 



CONTENTS. 



Page. 

3. The Glorified Messiah of Israel. The Day of 



Pentecost. About A. D. 30 31 

4. The Baptismal Formula. A. D. 30—125.. . 32 

5. The Christ of the Spirit. The Pauline Epistles. 

A. D. 53—63 32 

6. The Epistle to the Hebrews. A. D. 60 — 70. ... 35 

7. Clement of Rome. A. D. 95 36 

THE SECOND CENTURY. 

1. The Apostolic Fathers. Polycarp, 69 — 140?.. 37 

2. Christ, the Divine Logos. The Fourth Gospel, 

130—150. 37 

3. Conflict of Opinions ; the Genesis of Creeds. 

The Fathers of the Church 38 

4. Christ, the Universal Reason. Justin, mar- 

tyred 165 39 

5. The Germ of the Doctrine of the Trinity. 

Athenagoras, 176 41 

6. The Germ of the Doctrine of the Supremacy 

of the Church. Irenaeus, 175—202 42 

THE THIRD CENTURY. 

1. Beginnings of Emphasis upon Personal Con- 

sciousness of Sin. Tertullian, died 220 43 

2. Further Evolution of the Logos Doctrine. 

Clement of Alexandria, 189—220 44 

3. The Doctrine of the Logos, and the Eternal 

Generation of the Son. Origen, 186 — 254. ... 44 

4. The Doctrine of the Trinity taking Shape. 

Novatian, 250 45 

THE FOURTH CENTURY. 

1. The Orthodox Creed formulated and authoriz- 
ed. The Council at Nicaea, 325 46 



CONTENTS. 



iii 



Page. 

2. Basis of the "Apostles','' Creed. The Creed of 

Marcellus, 336 48 

3. The Founder op Christian Catholicity. 

Athanasius, 296—373 49 

THE FIFTH CENTURY. 

The Dogma of Original Sin and of Sacramental 
Grace. The PasE of the Church of Rome as 
Mediator between Christ and Man. August- 
ine, 355 — 430 51 

THE MIDDLE AGES. 

1. Ultimate Statement of the Orthodox Doctrine 

of the Trinity. Autocracy in Western 
Christendom of the Papal Church. The 
" Athanasian " Creed, 809 

2. The Medieval Theology 

3. Scholasticism. Reason consecrated to the 

Service of Dogma 

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

The Renaissance. Philosophy separated from 
Dogma. Reason placed above Church 



Authority 62 

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

1. The Reformation. Protest against the Au- 

tocracy of the Church. Restoration of the 
Bible to Private Judgment 63 

2. The Theology of the Reformation : substan- 

tially a Reaffirmation of Medieval 
Doctrine 64 



53 
56 

60 



iv 



CONTENTS. 



Page. 

3. Lines of Evolution of the Reformed Theology. 

Luther, 1483—1546. Calvin, 1 509—1564. Ar- 
minius, 1560—1609 65 

4. Development of Rationalism. Giordano Bruno, 

1548—1600. Boehm, 1575—1624. Lord Bacon, 
1561—1626. Descartes, 1596—1650 67 

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

1. Further Development of Rationalism. Ration- 

alistic Interpretation of the Bible. English 
Arianism : Puritanism : Platonism : Skeptic- 
ism : Deism. Locke, 1632 — 1704. Milton, 
1608—1674. Cromwell, 1599—1658. Cud- 
worth, 1617—1688. Hobbes, 1588—1679. 
Lord Herbert, 1582—1648 70 

2. Emancipated Philosophic Rationalism in Ger- 

many. Restoration of the Idea of the Unity 

of the L T niverse. Spinoza, 1632" — 1677 73 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

1. Development of Deistic and Skeptical Ration- 

alism in England. The Evangelical Revival. 
Extension of Arian and Soclnian Unitari- 
anism. Hume, 1711—1776. Wesley, 1703— 
17£1. Priestley, 1733—1804 75 

2. Preparation for a New Advance in the Evolu- 

tion of Christianity. German Illuminism. 
Moravian Pietism. Lessing, 1729 — 1781. 
Count Zinzendorf, 1700—1760 77 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
1. A New Advance of Christianity through the 
Reunion of Philosophic Rationalism and 
Christian Faith. Schleiermacher, 1768 — 
1834 79 



CONTENTS. 



V 



Page. 

MODERN UNITARIANISM. 

1. Further Development of the Protest against 

the Reformed Theology. The Moral Reac- 
tion in America from Calvinism. Ethical 
Idealism. William Ellery Charming, 1781 — 
1842 83 

2. American Transcendentalism. Philosophic Ra- 

tionalism and Religions Intuition. Pure 
Christianity, the Absolute Religion. Con- 
tinuity of Faith and Doctrine in the Evolution 
of the Church Universal. Ralph "Waldo 
Emerson, 1804—1882., Theodore Parker, 1810 
—1860. Frederic Henry Hedge, 1805—1890. 89 

3. Christian Faith in union not only with Philoso- 

phic Rationalism, but with the Philosophy 
of Science. Present Unitarianism among the 
Forces prophetic of a Form of Christianity, 
which shall realize for Mankind the full Reli- 
gions Consciousness of Jesus Christ, and, 
therein, Satisfaction of Man's Longing for 
Union with God 99 



We had not walked 
But for Tradition. We walk evermore 
To higher paths by brightening Eeason's lamp. 

George Eliot. 

There shall rise from this confused sound of voices 
A firmer faith than that our fathers knew, 

A deep religion which alone rejoices 
In worship of the Infinitely True ; 

Not built on rite or portent, but a finer 

And purer reverence for a Lord diviner. 

Lewis Morris. 



I. 



THE PERSON OF JESUS IN 
BIBLE AND CHURCH. 



The Christ Christendom worships is no pure historic 
person, but in part a creation of the human mind. Glory of 
Greek myth through John's Gospel flows in to fill out the 
Synoptic figure of the other Evangelists into sublimity, and 
Paul is so entranced with the ideal Saviour of inward revelation 
that he does not want to see the actual one of flesh and blood. 
The Christ was born of wedded Greek and Jewish mind. I 
doubt not the depths of that immense Personality would justify 
more than all we can say'. But the Personality is not construct- 
ible from any particulars of the story, without imaginative help. 
Christ is the increment of Jesus— the individual expanding 
an ideal. 

Dr. Cyrus A. Bartol 



THE PERSON OF JESUS IN BIBLE 
AND CHURCH. 



*HE Bishop of tlie Church of England in Japan, 



in his recent sermon on " The Faith of the 
Incarnation/' withdrew from Unitarians the name 
Christian, asserting, as his reason for so doing, 
that Unitarians "deny that which alone makes 
the Christ to be the hope of men/' "Think not" 
he urged, <c to include within the Christian name 
those who deny the verities of the Faith." 
What are these " verities of the Faith "? 
"Even the belief that, at a definite term in his- 
tory after long preparation by the Divine Provi- 
dence, in a chosen nation and Holy Family, through 
her willing obedience on whom had rested the 
divine choice, 'the word was made Flesh and 
dwelt among us,' and that ' of His Fulness all 
we received.' 

Consider these two principal statements sepa- 
rately. (1) 'The Word was made Flesh.' The 
Eternal Son of God who had lived during a past 
forever within the sphere of the Divine Being, a 
Person — for before creation personality alone was — 
the Son of the Father's love, who perfectly reflected 
and returned the love of which He was the object, 
Himself too the Divine Wisdom and Reason, in 
whom had been seeu and imaged the thoughts of 
God about the things and men which were to be, 
so loved the world that at the fulness of the itme 




2 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



He took our nature in its completeness, Body and 
Soul and Spirit, into His own, and became very 
God, very Man. His Deity indeed was veiled 
during the years of His Life on earth, and the 
use of its powers voluntarily foregone, in order 
that wholly like us, within the limitations of our 
nature, in perfect submission to the will of God 
the Holy Ghost, and like His own prophets, work- 
ing even His miracles by the Spirit's power, He 
might live and be tempted and suffer and die. 
Thus His life became our example and his present 
sympathy springs out of a true human experience; 
but none the less for this condescension was He 
essentially divine — not a man raised to the rank 
of Deity, but God who has stooped to assume 
humanity. 

(2) " This is the first part of the truth, and the 
other words which I have quoted are its due com- 
plement — c of His Fulness all we received. 5 Not 
for Himself alone, though the world shows forth 
His glory, did He create it. Not for Himself alone, 
though it were in the execution of an eternal pur- 
pose, did He assume our nature. The Church is 
the extension of the Incarnation, the Body of 
Christ. By that Holy Spirit, in and through whom 
He lived His earthly life, He has united it to Him- 
self, and in Himself to the Father. 1 Of His Ful- 
ness all we received/ says S. John, looking back 
to the quiet baptismal hour in which each of those 
around him — from the old man who had spent 
long years in the Master's service to the youngest 
Christian child in the congregation at Ephesus — 
had been received with the same sacred rite and 
words into the fellowship of Christ. And we may 
repeat without fear the same words to-day, as has 
each generation since, ( of His Fulness all we re- 
ceived. 5 All possess, all may use, if they will, the 
powers of the new regenerate life, which is theirs 



THE PERSON OF JESUS IN BIBLE AND CHURCH. 



3 



in Christ. All are united by the bond of a com- 
mon nature and new spiritual being with their 
one Lord. All, if they are true to Him, strive to 
reproduce the lineaments of character, the prin- 
ciples of the conduct, of which His own biogra- 
phies are the record. All find new springs of 
strength in fellowship with Him and in Him with 
one another. 

Such is the doctrine of our Lord's Incarnation 
and of its immediate purpose and issue." 

What are the grounds of this Faith? 

" First of all we believe it because we were taught 
it as the Church's Creed, and the first though not 
in all cases the last duty of men is to believe what 
they have been taught on sufficient authority. To 
hold a traditional Faith, a Faith which has come 
down to you, is no reproach in itself, though there 
are cases in which it becomes such. But with us it 
should be strong proof indeed which shook our 
hold on any article of the Faith which we have re- 
ceived. For what is the Creed but an epitome of 
the truths through the possession and belief of 
which the Church first came into being, and what is 
the Church regarded even externally but the great 
school of righteousness and goodness in the world, 
which uses as its instrument in the attainment of 
their greatest end, the truths with which it was 
entrusted ? When, then, we Christians say that 
we believe our Creed' because w 7 e were taught it, 
ours is no indolent plea in favour of our convic- 
tions being let alone, but rather it means this, that 
by God's kind Providence w T e find ourselves mem- 
bers of a great Society, through which we have 
learned the Faith, which it has held since its foun- 
dation, and which proves itself to us as it has to 
all who have preceded us, to be light and life. 
The burden of disproof does not lie with satisfied 
believers. 



4 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



And if we wish to go further in stating the 
grounds of our belief, we should probably next be- 
take ourselves to the familiar records of the words 
and works of our Lord himself. The claim which 
the Gospels make is practically no longer disputed. 
Unbelief has recognized it as well as faith. Uni- 
tarians no longer maintain, as a few years since, 
that the New Testament teaches Unitarianism." 

This, then, is the statement by the Bishop of the 
Church of England in Japan, of what constitute 
"the verities of the Faith," and the grounds upon 
which they are to be accepted. 

How far this statement is justified, by either 
Church history or the Christian records, I propose 
to examine. It will become evident, I believe, 
that neither authority supports it, in the sense in 
which it is here given ; that it consequently does 
not fully express " the verities of the Faith and 
that in the disproof Unitarians may make of this 
statement, they are not thereby separating them- 
selves from either Christ or the Christian Church. 

I. 

The Christology of the New Testament. 

But first, concerning the charge that Unitarians 
no longer maintain that the New Testament teaches 
the faith which gives them their dominational 
name, I w T ish to say, Dr. Bickersteth has been 
misinformed, or, he wholly misunderstands the 
writings of our representative scholars. I am well 
acquainted with Unitarian literature, and do not 
know of one of its writers who admits that, either 



THE PERSON OF JESUS IN BIBLE AND CHURCH. 



5 



the doctrine of the Trinity or of the Deity of Jesus 
Christ, considered as God the Son, differentiated 
from and yet co-equal with God the Father, is 
taught or even supported by the Christian script- 
ures. The representatives of Unitarian scholar- 
ship are en rapport with the most exact and devout 
Biblical criticism and exegesis. They are dedicat- 
ed to the service of the truth. They are conse- 
crated to discovering as far as can be known, just 
what may be held as Christian doctrine. But their 
work has not yet induced one of them to give 
over the teachings of the New Testament to 
Trinitarianism. Our critic will, of course, admit 
that the Unitarian scholars of former daj r s were 
anti-trinitarian as Biblical interpreters. The at- 
titude of their successors of the present day, sup- 
ported by a more intelligent and thorough inter- 
pretation of the Christian records, has not been 
changed. 

I could quote the testimony of many expositors 
among us, but it will suffice for me to summarize 
their conclusions. 

The New Testament, composed of records of the 
origin and beginnings of the " Gospel of Jesus 
Christ," is concentrated around the person and 
work of Jesus. These records are demonstrated 
to have been not contemporaneous ; nor are they 
homogeneous in the purport of their contents. 
They present the Person of Jesus as modified by 
contact with the varying modes of thought of wide- 



G 



CHRISTIAN IT Y IN HISTORY. 



ly separated and differently circumstanced bodies 
of disciples, through a period extending over more 
than a century. These presentations of the per- 
sonality of Jesus of Nazareth appear in a gradation 
of dignity from that of the esteem of the Jew for 
a Babbi, to that of the divine ascription in the 
Proem to the Fourth Gospel. But, nowhere among 
them, do Unitarian scholars discover the elevation 
of Jesus, even as the Christ, to Deity as the Second 
Person in an Eternal Trinity. That was an act of 
faith subsequent to the writing of any of the books 
of the Bible. 

Unitarian exegetes, in common with other scienti- 
fic interpreters of the Scriptures, find in the New 
Testament, at least four separable, and, in large 
part, separated, theories of the Person of Jesus 
of Nazareth. 

1. — Humanity, endowed with wonder-working 
power. 

2. — Humanity, divinely ordained and exalted as 
Messiah of the Jews. 

3. — Humanity, in which the Son of God, as spirit- 
ual Messiah, had appeared, and which, after death, 
had been by divine power raised again to life, and 
transferred to Heaven as " the Last Adam/' and 
Head of a new and divine Humanity. 

4th. — Humanity, in which the Divine Logos had 
become incarnate. 

The first two of these theories were character- 
istic of the popular Judaism of Galilee and Judea. 



THE PERSON OF JESUS IN BIBLE AND CHURCH. 



7 



They were prevalent throughout the life of Jesus. 
The second of them received its consummate ex- 
pression in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost. 

1. — The first theory was that of the fellow 
townsmen of Jesus and of the Jews generally. It 
was embodied in such inquiries as, "Whence hath 
this man this wisdom and these mighty works? 
Is not this the carpenter's son ? is not his mother 
called Mary? Whence then hath this man all 
these things?/' and in the declaration of the 
multitude at the time he made his triumphal 
entrance into Jerusalem, just before his cruci- 
fixion. "This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth." 

2. — Among the chosen disciples of Jesus, how- 
ever, belief in him as a man was noticeably more 
and more modified by a long held, absorbing, na- 
tional Messianic hope. With wavering fidelity 
they concentrated this hope upon him during his 
life. After his death it persisted among them, at 
first feebly, but with increasing strength and trans- 
figured meaning, until on the Day of Pentecost it 
received full endorsement in the notable address 
of the Apostle Peter, and became thenceforward 
the distinguishing faith of the Judaic Christians. 
This second theory of the Person of Jesus, as set 
forth in the Pentecostal address, is, "Ye men of 
Israel hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a 
man approved of God among you by miracles and 
wonders and signs which God did by Him : Him 
being delivered by the determinate counsel and 



8 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



foreknowlege of God, 3 T e have taken and by wick- 
ed hands have crucified and slain ; whom God hath 
raised up. Therefore being by the right hand of 
God exalted — let all Israel know assuredly that God 
hath made that same Jesus whom ye have cruci- 
fied, both Lord and Christ." This theory pervades 
and dominates the first three Gospels. Examin- 
ing these records, we find that, from the time of 
the journey of the Magi to the manger at Bethlehem 
to see "Him who was born King of the Jews," to 
the very last moment of the Christ's intercourse 
with his disciples at the "'Ascension" when the 
Apostles asked Him, "Lord wilt thou at this time 
restore again the Kingdom to Israel?" this theory 
was the controlling force of apostolic discipleship. 
And even after the "Ascension" the apostles waited 
in expectation of a speedy return of the ascended 
Messiah to place them on " twelve thrones to judge 
the twelve tribes of Israel," in the Kingdom from 
Heaven. 

3. — But, the New Testament records are not con- 
fined to setting forth the Palestinian doctrine of 
the Person of Jesus. Christianity at length came 
to have a larger reach than Judaism and the 
Jewish Messianic hope. An ideal for all huma- 
nity, issuing from faith in Jesus Christ, sprang 
into being and found a fervent advocate in a 
Hellenistic Jew, Saul of Tarsus, who, as Paul the 
Apostle, made the Christ known to the world. 
The Pauline theory of the Christ shapes a large 



THE PERSON OF JESUS IN BIBLE AND CHURCH. 



9 



part of the Christian scriptures. It is bo longer 
that of " the Son of Man." This phrase does not 
occur once in Paul's writings. la these, Jesus has 
become the glorified Lord in heaven, who " born 
of the seed of David according to the flesh, had 
been declared to be the Son of God with power, 
according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrec- 
tion of the dead." Yet more than this was em- 
bodied in the Pauline Chris tology. Jesus Christ 
was the Son of God in the spirit, descended among 
men, a " Last Adam," the progenitor of a new order 
of Humanity, or rather the " first born among 
many brethren," who after his work on the earth 
had been done had returned to the Heaven whence 
he had been sent. " God sent forth his Son, born 
of a woman, born under the law, that He might 
redeem them that were under the law." "Christ 
Jesus, who being in the form of God, counted it 
not a prize to be on an equality with God, but 
emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, 
being made in the likeness of men." The earthly 
life of Jesus was thus looked upon as but an 
event in his existence. The Pauline theology 
culminated in such passages as this. " To us there 
is one God. the Father, of whom are all things and 
we unto Him, and one Lord Jesus Christ through 
whom are all things and we through Him." 

I need not amplify these three theories of the 
Person of Jesus which Unitarian and most scientific 
Biblical students of the present day, find in the 



10 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



New Testament. It is evident, however, that none 
of these doctrines is Trinitarian in content or 
tendency. In none of them is Jesus set forth 
as God the Son. In the Petrine theory of the 
Christ, a man is ordained to, and is elevated to, 
kingly and celestial power and glory. In the 
Pauline theory, the Son of God, "the first born of 
every creature," tabes upon himself human nature, 
that thereby an old and outworn order of human 
life might be destroyed and that mankind might, 
by means of their connection with Christ, rise 
through the death of the flesh, redeemed spirits, 
children of God with Christ, their Elder Brother. 

II. 

The Christology of the New Testament : the 
Logos Doctrine. 

Unitarian scholars see a fourth theory of the 
Person of Jesus Christ enshrined in the New Tes- 
tament. It is that whose fullest expression is made 
in the Fourth Gospel, the theory of Christ as the 
incarnate Divine Logos. Bishop Biekersteth's 
Sermon had for its motive, the texts, " The Logos 
was made flesh," and "of his Fulness all we 
received/' both passages quoted from the first 
chapter of the "Gospel according to S. John." 
To Dr. Bickersteth, the first of these passages 
sets forth the orthodox faith, that God the eternal 
Son, the Second Person of the Divine Trinity, 
assumed human nature in the man Jesus of Naza- 
reth. This faith he presents as the fundamental 



THE PERSON OF JESUS IN BIBLE AND CHURCH. 1 1 

verity of Christianity. This, he asserts, Unitarians 
deny, thereby severing themselves from Christ's 
name and from Christ's body, the Church. This, 
he claims, Unitarians acknowledge to be the true 
New Testament doctrine, thereby surrendering the 
Christian scriptures, as no longer a stronghold 
for their own defense. 

I reply : Unitarians do not accept the Christ- 
ology of Trinitarianism ; but, in not accepting it, 
they in no measure admit that they deny any 
fundamental verity of Christian faith ; and they 
see no reason whatever for deserting the New 
Testament as no longer untrinitarian in its teach- 
ings. 

I cannot admit that the passage which Bishop 
Bickersteth selected as the motive to his appeal, 
weakens the position Unitarians have taken. Uni- 
tarian Biblical expositors do not ignore the doc- 
trine of the Christ as the incarnate Divine Logos. 
On the contrary, they have studied it long and 
reverently, only to come to the conclusion, how- 
ever, that the Logos becoming flesh, is very dif- 
ferent from the incarnation of the Second Person 
of a Triune God. 

4. — What is the New Testament doctrine of the 
incarnate Logos? It is the culmination of that 
process of the idealization of the Person of Jesus 
Christ, which took place in the Christian conscious- 
ness during the first century after the death of 
Jesus. The successive degrees of this idealization 



12 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



are quite clearly set forth in the New Testament. 
I have indicated what they were. We have seen 
how the man Jesus of Nazareth became identified 
in the minds of the Palestinian, Jewish Christians 
with the divinely ordained Messiah, long hoped 
for by the nation. This is the Christ of the first 
three Gospels. We have seen, too, how the man 
Jesus was transfigured, as the Son of God sent 
from Heaven, to be the spiritual Messiah for both 
Jew and Gentile, and who had become through 
death and resurrection, " the Last Adam," the 
Head of a new and divine Humanity. This is the 
Christ of the Pauline epistles and of many Hellen- 
ized Jews. But still another, higher, degree was 
possible for the advancing Christology, before the 
writings which were at length included in the 
New Testament were all composed, the sublime 
faith of the Fourth Gospel ; Christ set forth as the 
Logos incarnate. 

Unitarians, with most of the scientific historians 
and Biblical critics of modern times, can see 
plainly how the Logos doctrine, the highest theme 
of the theological speculations of the Alexandrian 
Jews of the first Christan century, became associa- 
ted with the spreading faith in the " glorified 
Christ.'' To understand this doctrine and the use 
made of it in shaping Christian faith, is to under- 
stand the consummation of the faith of early 
Christendom in the Person of Jesus, so far as the 
Christian scriptures are concerned. What occur- 



THE PEESON OF JESUS IN BIBLE AND CHURCH. 



13 



red farther in the development of the doctrine of 
Christ's Person, as, for example, his incorporation 
into a Divine Trinity as its Second Person, is a 
theme in the study of Church History, not of New 
Testament exegesis. 

What, then, was the Logos doctrine ? We shall 
glance at its central contents. Philo, an Alexandri- 
an Jew, born just before the Christian era, who be- 
came the representative of the Logos doctrine as 
it was received into Christianity, taught, under 
the influence of a speculation quite common at 
the time in both the Greek and Roman philoso- 
phies, that God is absolute spirit, having no 
contact with matter, and that intermediary be- 
tween Him and the world is the Word, the Logos. 
Philo's wide reaching work was the application of 
this speculation to the Jewish theology, and to 
Old Testament history. He profoundly influenced 
Jewish thought outside of Palestine, especially 
that of Northern Egypt and of Southern Asia 
Minor. To many Jews the idea gradually became 
familiar and commonplace, that, between the 
absolute God and man and the world, there is, 
and in their national history had been, an in- 
termediary being, the Logos, the Word of Jehovah, 
the only begotten Son, the image aud agent of 
the only true God and Father, in contact with 
both extremes, the Divine and the Human. 

Philo did not identify the Logos with Jesus 
Christ or with any man. That was not done until 



14 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



the growing Church had come under the influence 
of the Alexandrian philosophy, or that of Alexan- 
drian Jews who had become Christian believers. 
Towards the end of the first hundred years after 
the death of Jesus the Logos doctrine appeared 
in Christian writings. "We see it in certain New 
Testament boobs, the Epistles to the Ephesians, to 
the Coiossians and to the Hebrews. It reached 
its full declaration, however, in the Fourth Gospel. 
Excepting its association with the Person of 
Christ, the Logos doctrine of this Gospel is sub- 
stantially that of Philo. Philo taught that the 
Logos is from the beginning, not eternal in the 
sense that God is eternal, but deriving his being 
from God his Father ; the only begotten Son ; the 
divine manifestation of God ; Maker and Lord of 
all things, yet always under the control of the only 
one God ; the Son having the glory of the Father; 
the one source of life and salvation. These ascrip- 
tions might as easily be taken from the Fourth 
Gospel and the Logos epistles, which are ascribed 
to the Apostle Paul, where Christ is presented as 
the image of the invisible God ; the one through 
whom all things were made and by whom they 
consist ; in whom dwells all the fulness of the 
Godhead bodily, and who is seated at the right 
hand of God. 

Now, granting all that may be legitimately 
claimed for the transcendent exaltation of the 
Jewish Logos, evidently the distinction of superior 



THE PERSON OF JESUS IN BIBLE AND CHUBCH. 



15 



and subordinate steadily persists "between the 
absolute God and Him. Unitarian Biblical stu- 
dents see a like relationship between the Father 
and Christ the Word. We cannot surrender the 
Christian Scriptures to Trinitarianism. I refer by 
way of illustration of our position, to two repre- 
sentative writers, Prof. Toy of Harvard University 
in America, and Dr. James Martineau of England. 
Prof. Toy is not denominationally a Unitarian ; as 
for intellectual attitude, however, he stands just 
where we are. 

Prof. Toy says : cc The New Testament, with all 
the grandeur of character and function that it as- 
cribes to Christ, maintains the unique supremacy 
of the One God. The demand for a mediating 
power between God and Humanity is pushed to 
the farthest point which thought can occupy, con- 
sistently with the maintenance of the absoluteness 
of the one supreme Deity." Dr. Martineau, speak- 
ing of the incarnate Logos, says: "The Son, 
whether originated in time or not, is intrinsically 
subordinate to the Father. The initiation is ever 
with the Father as absolute Cause, the effect only 
with the Son as agent relatively to the world. 
The divine 'Word' cannot speak save what the 
divine thought may give Him to say. He does 
not come of himself, but is no less sent into the 
world than the disci])les whom He commissions as 
His ambassadors in turn. Even in this high and 
mystic doctrine, the co-equality variously gives 



16 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



way. The relation (of Father and Son) cannot be 
turned round ; and though the Son is of the Su- 
preme essence, the Father preoccupies and forever 
keeps, the name of the 'true God' and is the 
invisible perfection which the Word is commission- 
ed to manifest. 7 ' 

But I have said enough, I think, to make it clear 
that Bishop Bickersteth thoroughly misunder- 
stands Unitarians when he asserts that they long- 
ago gave up the Christian scriptures to anti-uni- 
tarianism and orthodox Christianity. The Christ- 
ian scriptures are an heritage which Unitarianism 
has received in common with all Christendom. 
Our effort to understand these scriptures is as 
earnest and as reverent as that of any other body 
of Christian disciples. Our Unitarianism is ia 
large part a direct effect of this study. To many 
of us it is scarcely credible that an unprejudiced 
mind can find the doctrine of the Trinit}^ in the 
Bible, even by implication. History shows how 
and when the doctrine of the Trinity appeared in 
Christendom. We know that it appeared long after 
the Sacred Canon had closed. It was the final 
act of the idealizing faith of the early Church, the 
steps of which, to the theory of the incarnation of 
the Logos, are plainly marked in the New Testa- 
ment, and have been pointed out here. 

III. 

The Cheistology of Unitarianism. 
There remains to me the duty of making a state- 



THE PERSON OF JESUS IN BIBLE AND CHURCH. 



17 



ment of the theory of the Person of Jesus Christ, 
commonly held by Unitarians. When, however, I 
say " commonly held/' I do not mean either uni- 
versally, or always, held. The theories of Christ's 
Person advocated by Unitarians, are the same uni- 
versally and have always been the same, only in 
their denial of the doctrine that in Jesus Christ, 
the Second Person of a Divine Trinity was incar- 
nate. In the history of our denomination we find 
as many differing theories of the Person of Jesus 
of Nazareth as there are in the New Testament 
scriptures, from the simple humanitarianism of the 
village associates of Jesus, to the transcendent 
Logos incarnation dominant among the philoso- 
phic Christians of Alexandria. At the present day 
this same wide range of opinion may be found 
among the members of our churches. But it is 
also true, that among those who may be now con- 
sidered representative teachers, who are most in- 
fluential in directing Unitarian thought, there is 
an increasing harmony of opinions concerning 
Jesus, of so wide an inclusion, that we may say it 
expresses the Christology commonly held among 
us. 

What is the Christology of Modern Unitarianism? 
It is not that of the Roman Catholic and of 
Orthodox Christians, nor that of the Fourth Gos- 
pel, nor that of the Pauline Epistles, nor that even 
of the Synoptic Gospels. Yet it is in no degree 
inferior to any of these. As the Christian con- 



18 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



sciousness of each succeding century in early 
Christian history, was impelled to define the Per- 
son of Jesus Christ anew, so has it been in this 
Modern Age. Among Unitarians, the advancing 
apotheosis of Jesus as the Christ, has been carried 
yet farther forward, and, possibly, to an ultimate 
position. 

All Unitarians would agree with Bisop Bicker- 
steth's answer to his question, "What is it that 
the most devout and religious minds in all times 
and lands have longed for, and striven to reach 
and grasp ? Is it not some true, some satisfying 
mode of union with and likeness to God ?" The 
record, in so large part, of patient, earnest, often 
vehement and passionate, search of Unitarian 
Christians for God ; a search, often persisted in 
through persecution, shame and death, for one 
who shall be known to be " God with man," shows 
how deeply this longing of the ages has been felt 
among them. They make a radical mistake, who 
say that w T e seek to destroy any real bond by 
which faith has brought God and man together. 
Unitarianism. has come not to destroy but to fulfill. 
We have denied the doctrine of the incarnation, in 
Jesus of Nazareth, of the Second Person of a Divine 
Trinity. But we have denied it for, substantially the 
same reason as that by which the Church Fathers 
of the third and the fourth centuries, the creators 
of the Christian Trinity, were compelled to deny 
the doctrine of the incarnation of the divine Logos 



THE PERSON OF JESUS IN BIBLE AND CHURCH. 19 

which they had inherited from the Church of the 
second century ; we have denied it in the same 
spirit with which the earlier Church rose above the 
Christology of the Apostle Paul to that of the 
Logos doctrine; for the same reason as that by 
which the Apostle Paul advanced his thought of 
the Christ beyond that of the Apostle Peter and 
of jthe Jerusalem Jews ; the reason, namely, that 
the irrepressible longing of the human soul for 
immediate, conscious union with God, was not 
yet satisfied. 

"But Unitarianism is Humanitarianism, " it will 
be charged in reply. " To Unitarians, Jesus Christ 
is not God but man. " Yet, to us, he is no more 
really a man than he is in Trinitarian Christology, 
properly understood and taught. In all orthodox 
creeds Jesus Christ is presented as, in a true 
sense of the word, human. It is one of the 
memorable achievements of the Catholic and 
Orthodox theology, that it has invariably taught 
the proper and complete humanity of Jesus. The 
repeated struggles of the early Christian Church 
to preserve this article of faith, are among the 
most instructive of its records. The Manichaean 
heresy, that of Apollinaris, and that of Eutiches, 
which were condemned by general councils in the 
fourth and fifth centuries, because they taught, 
respectively, that the humanity of Jesus was a 
mere illusion, that Jesus had no human soul, and 
that the divine nature in Christ wholly absorbed 



20 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



the human, are significant illustrations of the 
faithfulness of the Church to the reality of the 
humanity of Jesus. The Orthodox creed sets forth 
the doctrine of the incarnation of God the Son 
in Jesus, but it teaches, as clearly as Unitarians 
teach, Jesus Christ's real nature as man. So far 
as belief in the man Jesus is in question, Orthodox 
Christians and Unitarians stand together. 

"But Unitarianism is mere Humanitarianism; , 
it may be answered. £C To Unitarians, God was 
not incarnate in the man Jesus." Yet, we claim 
that the mark of Christian discipleship is the faith 
of the incarnation. Unitarians find their deepest 
inspiration, their sublimest hope in this faith. The 
real difference between Orthodox and Unitarian 
Christians arises from the difference beween two 
definitions or explanations of the same idea. Back 
of the Orthodox and the Modern Unitarian con- 
ceptions of the Incarnation, lie fundamentally 
unlike thoughts of Deity, and of God's relation to 
man and the world. Orthodoxy had its source in 
a thought of God which assumed a separation 
between Deity and man and nature, not only by 
spiritual essence, but also by distances of space. 
To illustrate ; the Christianity of the Apostolic 
Church started from the Jewish popular notion 
that God had, from the distant heavens, ordained 
Jesus to be the Messiah of His chosen people, and 
had endowed him with superhuman powers by 
His Spirit, to complete the Messianic mission. 



THE PERSON OF JESUS IN BIBLE AND CHUBCH. 



21 



But, when Christianity was carried beyond the 
bounds of Jewish life and thought, the Christian 
mind, under a profound er theology than that of 
the Palestinian disciples, began a struggle con- 
cerning the Person of Christ, which continued with 
deepening intensity for more than four hundred 
years. The Pauline Christology, which set forth 
Jesus as the incarnation of the Son of God, the 
first born of all the creation, was a great advance 
upon the faith which had preceded it. The 
Apostle himself was influenced by the contem- 
porary Greco-Roman speculation, which affirmed 
that there is an essential connection between God 
and man, the God "in whom we live and move and 
have our being/' yet the Christology of Paul's 
epistles w T as not wholly freed from the current 
dualistic conceptions of Judaism. The Logos 
doctrine of the Fourth Gospel was still farther a 
movement towards emancipation of Christian faith. 
But it was not until the Fathers of the Church of 
the third and fourth centuries had wrought the 
enlarging and deepening faith in the Christ into 
the doctrine of the Trinity, that the real doctrine 
of the God-man, the " true God " who had assumed 
human nature, became a part of Christian con- 
sciousness. The doctrine of the Trinity itself bears 
witness to the struggle in the Christian Church 
for a satisfying statement of the Incarnation. In 
substance, it is a product of the Greek philosophic 
conviction, that "the true God" is immanent in 



22 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



the world and in man. In form, as Father, Son; 
and Holy Spirit, although set forth as One God 
in three Persons, it bears the marks of the antece- 
dent, unsatisfying faiths whose place it had taken. 
Dr. James Freeman Clarke said, " No doctrine of 
Orthodoxy is so false in its form, and so true in 
its substance, as this. 5 ' Again, speaking of the 
doctrine of the deification of Christ, as embodied 
in Orthodox creeds, this same writer remarked, 
"We cannot but think this doctrine far truer 
than the Arianism which so long struggled in the 
Church for supremacy." 

The development of the theory of Christ's Per- 
son, however, received, soon after the confirmation 
of the doctrine of the Trinity, a check which lasted 
for more than a thousand years. With the esta- 
blishment of the Roman Papacy, and the domina- 
tion of the Augustinian theology, the influence of 
the Greek idea of the immanence of God in man 
and the world gave way. Christian thought was 
thenceforward shaped by dogma based upon the 
notion of God's absolute transcendence in relation 
to the human soul. The doctrine of the Trinity 
remained, but it lost its real motive and reason 
for being. The humanity of Christ practically dis- 
appeared, obscured by his awful Deity. 

No change for the better in the theory of 
Christ's Person took place until the Renaissance 
had made the thought of Christendom free again. 
A large number of the Reformed churches perpet- 



THE PERSON OF JESUS IN BIBLE AND CHURCH. 23 

uated in Calvinism, the Augustinian theology and 
Christology, but many earnest Christians protested 
against the continued dominance of the Medieval 
dogmas. The Unitarian protests, which soon fol- 
lowed the Reformation, were a return to one or 
another of the New Testament theories of Christ's 
Person. The Socinian struggles of the seventeenth 
century and later, were often made in the interests 
of a barren humanitarianism; nevertheless they 
were aroused by a legitimate claim upon the hu- 
manity of Christ, which had been practically taken 
from Christian faith. The Socinians did a much 
needed work in clearing the way for the advance 
of a truer Christology. 

During the present century a large part of Pro- 
testant Christendom has been brought, by a free 
philosophy and science, under the influence of a 
mode of thought very like that of the Greek Fa- 
thers of the fourth century. In many directions 
Christian theology has thereby been becoming 
more and more satisfying to both intellectual and 
spiritual needs. The doctrine of the Trinity is 
still a fundamental tenet of Orthodox Christian 
faith, but it has been brought back from the iso- 
lation it had in the Middle Ages, and, in one or 
another form, been put into vital connection with 
Christian faith. At least, what is vital in the 
doctrine of the Trinity has been put into intimate 
contact with Christian faith. The sermon of 
Bishop Bickersteth, which has called forth this 



24 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



reply, is, itself, an illustration of my meaning. 

Modern Unitarianism, as I have said, does not 
seek to perpetuate the Patristic Trinity, or the 
Christology involved in it. We see great beauty 
and truth in a doctrine of Father, Son and Holy 
Spirit, but, to us, there is only " one God, the Fa- 
ther." Modern Unitarianism is guided by the 
conviction that there is only one God, and that 
God is immanent in the Universe ; its Source, 
Power, Life, Providence, and End. Our Christ- 
ology therefore is, that so far as God was incar- 
nate in Jesus, He was incarnate in him, in no way 
essentially different from that of his incarnation in 
all human souls. "Whatever difference there was 
between Jesus and other men, we believe, was in 
the degree of the divine communion with him, 
not in its kind. To the faith of most of us, the con- 
sciousness of God in Christ reached an intensity- 
a dignity, a sublimity, which has made him the 
chief among men to whom we may turn as our 
Way, our Truth, our Life. It matters not that the 
Christian records vary in their conception and 
portrayal of the Man of Nazareth. Jesus, we be, 
lieve, still stands before the world as the greatest 
of all the prophets of the soul. It has been well 
said that " only a Christ could invent a Christ." 
It is not the historic Christ who has ruled the 
Church, who now receives the homage of men's 
souls, and who will guide mankind hereafter. It 
is the ideal Christ, the result of the impression 



THE PERSON OF JESUS IN BIBLE AND CHURCH. 25 

which Jesus made upon his contemporaries, and 
of the transfiguration of that impression by those 
who have drawn inspiration from the New Testa- 
ment records. Dr. F. H. Hedge wrote, "If the 
Christ of the Church, of Christian faith, is an ideal 
being, it was Jesus of Nazareth who made the 
ideal. The ideal in him is simply the result of 
that disengagement from the earthly vestiture, 
which death and distance work in all who live in 
history. By the very necessity of its function 
history idealizes. We misread the Gospel and 
reverse the true and divine order, if we suppose 
the ideal Christ to be an essence distilled from 
the historical. On the contrary, the ideal Christ 
is the root and grouud of the historical; and with- 
out the antecedent idea inspiring, commanding, 
the history would never have been. 5 ' 

From what has been given to the world of the 
career of Jesus of Nazareth, there has been evolved 
for many earnest minds the personality of one 
in whom the consciousness of God, the Father, 
became supreme ; of his God who is also our God, 
of his Father who is also our Father; and who 
thereby gave to man " a true, satisfying mode of 
union with and likeness to God." "In the very 
constitution of the human soul," says Dr. Martin- 
eau, "there is provision for an immediate appre- 
hension of God. But often in the transient lights 
and shades of conscience we pass on and know not 
who it is; and not until we see in another the victory 



26 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



•which shames our defeat, and are caught up by an 
enthusiasm for some realized heroism or sanctity, 
do the authority of right and the beauty of holiness 
come home to us as an appeal literally Divine. 
The train of the conspicuously righteous in their 
several degrees are for us the real angels that pass 
to and fro on the ladder that reaches from earth to 
heaven. And if Jesus of Nazareth in virtue of 
the characteristics of his spirit, holds the place of 
Prince of Saints and perfects the conditions of the 
pure religious life, he thereby reveals the highest 
possibilities of the human soul and their dependence 
on habitual communion between man and God." 

The Christology of TJnitarianism, therefore, 
directs us to the Man of Nazareth, not as dominated 
by an indwelling celestial, or super-angelic, spirit, 
nor even as possessed by the eternal Son of God, 
incarnate in him, made thereby the bond between 
a separated Humanity and Deity, but as so con- 
scious of "the true God" within, that he is the pro- 
totype of a Divine Humanity; illuminating by his 
faith and life, the essential Fatherhood of God, and 
anticipating the possible consious divine childship 
of every human soul. 



II. 



EVOLUTION 
AND METAMORPHOSES OF 
CHRISTIANITY. 



Historically regarded, Jesus is uplifted on the great wave 
formed by the confluence of three main courses of ancient life 
and thought, the Hebrew, Oriental, and Greek, — all embraced 
in the imperial sway of Eome. His life, as the fulfillment of 
Hebrew Messianic prophecy, becomes the central and pivotal 
fact in the annals of mankind. However it be interpreted, the 
doctrine of the Church remains, that in it met all the separate 
threads of human development : so that, religiously regarded, 
it becomes the great revelation of God in human life. 

Dr. Joseph H. Allen. 



What we call Christianity is a vast ocean, into which flow a 
number of spiritual currents of distant and various origin ; 
certain religions, that is to say, of Asia and Europe, the great 
ideas of Greek wisdom, and especially those of Platonism. 
What is essential and original in it is the practical demonstra- 
tion that the human and the divine nature may co-exist, may 
become fused into one sublime name. What is specific in 
Christianity is Jesus — the religious consciousness of Jesus. The 
sacred sense of his absolute union with God, through perfect 
love and self-surrender, this profound, invincible, and tranquil 
faith of his has become a religion. 

Henri Frederic Amiel. 



GLIMPSES OF THE EVOLUTION 
AND METAMORPHOSES 
OF CHRISTIANITY. 



THE FIRST CENTURY. 

1. Primitive Christianity in Contem- 
porary History. Tacitus. A.D. 54-117.— The 
Roman historian Tacitus, who, it is said, ranks 
" beyond dispute in the highest place among 
men of letters in all ages," was born about the 
middle of the first century of the Christian Era. 
In his Annals, he speaks of the attempt of the 
emperor Nero, to divert from himself the odium 
which befell him as the suspected cause of the 
great fire in Rome, by accusation of the new and 
increasing religious sect, "commonly known as 
Christians. 5 ' 

"The originator of this name," w 7 rote Tacitus, 
" was one Christus, who was put to death as a 
criminal, under the procurator Pontius Pilate, in 
the reign of Tiberius." 

2. The Beginnings of Christianity. 
Jesus of Nazareth . The Synoptic Gospels ; The 
Acts of the Apostles. A. D. 30-125 ?— Within the first 
hundred and twenty five years after the birth of 
Jesus of Nazareth, what are now known as the 
Synoptic Gospels, — Matthew, Mark, and Luke, — 



30 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



and the Acts of the Apostles, came into existence. 
According to them, the first explicit public claim 
which Jesus made concerning himself, was in 
the synagogue at " Nazareth where he had been 
brought up." There he " stood up for to read. 
And there was delivered unto him the book of the 
prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the 
book, he found the place where it was written, 
' The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he 
hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the 
poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken hearted? 
to preach deliverance to the captives, and recover- 
ing of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them 
that are bruised ; to preach the acceptable year of 
the Lord/ 

" And he began to say unto them, c This day is 
this Scripture fulfilled in your ears/ And all bore 
him witness and wondered at the gracious words 
which proceeded out of his mouth. And they 
said, 'Is not this Joseph's son?"' (Luke 4:16-22). 
Upon this announcement at Nazareth Jesus devot- 
ed himself to a public ministry of religious teaching 
and of wonderful deeds in Galilee and Judea, con- 
tinuing for from one to three years. 

At last, betrayed by one of his chosen followers, 
Jesus was arrested at Jerusalem, and taken before 
the Jewish Council, where he was asked, " If thou 
art the Christ, tell us. But he said, 'If I tell 
you, ye will not believe/ And they all said, c Art 
thou then the Son of God ? ' And he said, c Ye 



EVOLUTION AND M ttTAMOBPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 31 

say that I am.' And the whole company of them 
rose up and brought him before Pilate/' where he 
was accused of having called himself, " Christ, 
an anointed king." "And Pilate asked him, 'Art 
thou the king of the Jews ? ' He answered ' Thou 
sayest.' " 

Jesus was crucified as, "The King of the Jews." 
(Luke 22, and 23). 

3. The Glorified Messiah of Israel. 

The Day of Pentecost About A.D. 30.— In the "Acts 
of the Apostles," it is recorded that the disciples of 
Jesus, and devout Jews " from every nation under 
heaven," came together on the Day of Pentecost, 
not long after the crucifixion. At that time the 
Apostle Peter "'stood up with the eleven," and 
made this proclamation ; — 

"Ye men of Israel, hear these words : Jesus of 
Nazareth, a man approved of God unto you by 
mighty works and wonders and signs, which God 
did by him in the midst of you, even as ye your- 
selves know ; him being delivered up by the de- 
terminate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye 
by the hand of lawless men, did crucify and slay. — 
This Jesus did God raise up, whereof we all are 
witnesses. Being therefore at the right hand of 
God exalted, and having received of the Father 
the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath poured 
forth this, which ye see and hear. — Let all the 
house of Israel therefore know assuredly, that 
God hath made him both Lord and Christ, this 



32 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



Jesus "whom ye crucified." 

4. The Baptismal Formula. A. D. 30-125. 
— At the close of the Pentecostal address, so the 
record runs, many " were pricked in their heart* 
and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, 
Men and brethren what shall we do ?" The answer 
was, " Repent and be baptized every one of you in 
the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, 
and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." 

Throughout the first century, baptism "in the 
name of Christ," or "in the name of the Lord" 
(Acts 10: 48), or "in the name of the Lord Jesus" 
(Acts 19: 5), or "into Christ" (Gal. 3: 27), was, 
apparently, the one simple formula used for 
entrance into membership in the Christian Church. 
It is supposed that one of the notable marks of an 
early metamorphosis of the Person of Jesus, lies 
in the baptismal formula embodied in the closing 
words of "the Gospel according to S. Matthew," 
where the ascending Jesus declares to the eleven; 
"all authority hath been given unto me in heaven 
and on earth. Go ye therefore and make disciples 
of all nations, baptizing them into the name of 
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." 
(Mat. 28: 19). By the time the Synoptic Gospels 
had received their permanent form, about A. D. 
100-125?, the historic Christ had thus already be- 
come transformed and idealized. 

3. Th e Christ of the 'Spirit. The Pauline 
Epistles. A.D. 53-63. — In the epistles of Paul, we 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 33 

have, in original and completed form, the earliest 
of the Christian records. In doctrine, excepting 
the bax3tismal formula at the close of Matthew, there 
is in these epistles a much higher Christology than 
we find in the Synoptic Gospels. Paul wrote his 
most important letters, within thirty years after 
the Crucifixion. 

While called Saul of Tarsus, " breathing threat- 
ening and slaughter against the disciples of the 
Lord/' commissioned by the high priest to bring 
bound to Jerusalem any of the Damascus Jews 
"that were of the Way," Paul became, himself, a 
Christian disciple, and "straightway," among those 
whom he had been persecuting, "proclaimed 
Jesus that He is the Son of God." (Acts 9 : 20). 
Thenceforth, Paul, consecrated his life to the 
Gospel of the Christ, and did more than any other 
one man to make Christianity a religion of the 
Spirit, and a faith and life for mankind. But it 
was not the Jesus of Nazareth " who went about 
doing good," to whom Paul consecrated his great 
powers. It was to the " Son of God," " born of 
the seed of David according to the flesh and 
declared to be the Son of God with power accord- 
ing to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection 
of the dead." (Rom. 1:1-6). "We preach Christ 
crucified," (1 Cor. 1: 23), Paul announced, " deter- 
mined not to know anything, save Jesus Christ 
and him crucified." (1 Cor. 2 : 2). "Even though 
we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we 



34 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



know him so no more. If an}' man is in Christ 
he is a new creature." (2 Cor. 5: 16). 

In the Pauline Christology the Jewish Messiah 
disappeared. "To us there is one God, the Fa- 
ther, of whom are all things and we unto Him : 
and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are 
all things and we through Him. (1 Cor. 8:6). 

To the Apostle to the Gentiles a spiritual 
Messiah had been revealed. " As in Adam all die, 
so also iu Christ shall all be made alive." (1 Cor. 
15:22). "The first man Adam became a living 
soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 
The first man is of the earth, earthy : the second 
man is of heaven." (1 Cor. 15 : 45-48). To Paul's 
faith, through the coming of the Son of God into 
the world a conscious divine humanity, a humanity 
of the Spirit, had been created. " God sent forth 
his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 
that he might redeem them which were under the 
law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. 
And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit 
of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba Father." 
(Gal. 4: 4-7). A new covenant of God with man 
had been made, " not of the letter but of the 
spirit: for the letter Idlleth, but the spirit giveth 
life." "Ye died and your life is hid with Christ 
in God." (Col. 3: 3). 

Once Paul associated in an apostolic act, God, 
the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost; in the 
benediction with which his Second Epistle to the 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 35 

Corinthians closed. 

The culmination of the Pauline Ohristology is 
reached in the introduction to the Epistle to the 
Colossians, which, whether or not from the pen 
of the Apostle, is thoroughly in harmony with 
the tendency and steady development of his 
thought. — " Thanks unto the Father/ 5 he writes, 
" who delivered us out of the power of darkness 
and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of 
his love, who is the image of the invisible God, 
the first born of all creation ; for in him were all 
things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, 
things visible and things invisible, whether thrones 
or dominions or principalities or powers; all things 
have been created through him, and unto him ; 
and he is before all things, and in him all things 
consist. It was the good pleasure of the Father 
that in him should all the fulness dwell." 

If, as is supposed, the letter to the Colossians 
was written in the year 62, Jesus of Nazareth, 
who on the Day of Pentecost had been proclaimed 
"a man approved of God," and exalted to a heav- 
enly seat as the Lord and Christ of Israel, had, 
within less than a generation afterwards, become, 
to a part of the growing Church, an incarnated 
superangelic spirit, God's agent in all Creation, 
Providence and Destiny. 

6. The Epistle to the Hebrews. A.D. 
60-70. — A yet farther degree in the New Testa- 
ment metamorphosis of the Person of Christ was 



36 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



readied. Competent critics are inclined to the 
opinion that this epistle was not written by Paul, 
but by some one who had accepted the Pauline 
Christology, and, by it, sought to exalt the Christ 
ideal among the Jewish Christians to a like level 
with that presented to the Gentiles. In the 
opening of the " Epistle to the Hebrews/ 5 we read, 
" God having of old, time spoken unto the fathers 
in the prophets by divers portions and in divers 
manners, hath at the end of these days spoken 
unto us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of 
all things, through whom also he made the 
worlds: who being the effulgence of his glory, 
and the very image of his substance, and up- 
holding all things by the word of his power, sat 
down on the right hand of the Majesty on high ; 
having become by so much better than the angels, 
as he hath inherited, a more excellent name than 
they/ 5 

Just when this epistle was written we do not 
know. Christologically however it brings us to 
the boundary, to cross which discloses the sublime 
vision with which the Fourth Gospel opens. 

7. Clement of Home. A.D. 95.— One other 
voice speaks to us from the first century, as the 
century closes, that of the bishop of the Church 
at Eome. It has not the rapt, mystic tone of the 
aged Paul, longing to depart and be with Christ, 
but it exalts before the Church at Corinth, "The 
sceptre of the majesty of God, our Lord Jesus 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 37 



Christ, who came not in the show of pride and 
arrogance, though he could have done so ; but 
with humility, as the Holy Ghost had before 
spoken concerning him." 

THE SECOND CENTURY. 

1. The Apostolic Fathers. Polycarp, 69- 
140? — With the exception of the Epistle to the 
Corinthians, from the pen of Clement of Rome, 
there is but one other writing of the Church 
Fathers who had been contemporary with any 
of the Apostles, which can now be accepted as 
genuine, — the letter of Polycarp to the Philip- 
pi ans. Polycarp's ideal of the Christ, however, 
hardly rises to the level of that of the Apostle 
Paul. He believes " on Him that raised up our 
Lord Jesus Christ from the dead and hath given 
him glory and a throne at his right hand." He 
had often talked " with John and the rest "who 
had seen the Lord." Polycarp is supposed to have 
been born in the year 69. He suffered martyrdom 
near the middle of the second century. 

2. Christ the Divine Logos. The Fourth 
Gospel, 130-150.— Towards the middle of the 
second century appeared the most momentous, — 
considered in its Christology,— of all the writings 
which at last formed part of the Canon of the New 
Testament, " the Gospel according to S. John." 
This is a record of the life of Jesus, and is one 
of the four " Gospels" of the Christian scriptures. 



38 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



But, while it is grouped with " Matthew, Mark 
and Luke/' it stands apart from them with an 
individuality which can not be ignored, or con- 
cealed. It is the embodiment of a new thought 
of Christ and his Gospel. It is the vision of the 
everlasting Logos incarnate. 

" In the beginning was the Word, and the "Word 
was with God and the Word was God. The same 
was in the beginning with God. 

" And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among 
us (and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only 
begotten from the Father) full of grace and truth. 

" No man hath seen God at any time ; the only 
begotten Son, w r hich is in the bosom of the Father, 
he hath declared him." 

As the visible life of Jesus drew to its close, 
"Philip saith unto him ' Lord shew us the Father, 
and it sufllceth us ! ' Jesus saith unto him, c Have 
I been so long time with you, and dost thou not 
know me, Philip ? he that hath seen me hath seen 
the Father. Believest thou not that I am in the 
Father and the Father in me ? the words that I 
say unto you I speak not from myself, but the 
Father abiding in me doeth his works.'" 

The Fourth Gospel closes with the words, 
" These are written that ye may believe that Jesus 
is the Christ the Son of God ; and that believing 
ye may have life in his name. " 

3. Conflict of Opinions; the Genesis of 
Creeds. The Fathers of the Church. — The first four 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 



39 



centuries of the Christian Era were the scene of a 
violent struggle among the recipients of Christian 
tradition, over the question of what is true or false 
doctrine. It is not the purpose here, however, to 
attempt an exhibit of the complex contest. At 
times it was a struggle of all the churches against 
the world. At times it was the clash of party with 
party within the sacred fellowship. Opinion was 
many sided in its variety. It gathered chiefly 
about the Person of Christ. From the middle of 
the second century onward for two hundred years, 
there was no rest or steady progress in formulating 
doctrine. Faith was driven hither and thither 
under the impulses of contending sects, whose 
name was legion. To review this conflict would 
distract too much our attention. We shall notice 
in it, especially, the successive signs of the devel- 
opment of that doctrine which came at length 
to express for Christendom the Orthodox and 
Catholic faith concerning the Person of the Christ. 
This development had a substantial continuity, 
although at times it was arrested and seemingly 
also, for a period, turned backward. By means of 
quotations from contemporary literature we shall 
gain instructive glimpses of the process. 

4. Christ the Universal Logos, or Rea- 
son. Justin, martyred 165. — About the middle of 
the second century, Christianity appeared distinctly 
in contemporary history. Philosophers and other 
men of repute became interested in Christian doc- 



40 



CHRISTIANITY IX HISTORY. 



trine. Dr. J. H. Allen, says, " Clearly throughout 
the New Testament, the leading idea is that Jesus 
was the Messiah of the Jews, in however spiritual 
fashion this office might be interpreted ; and, so 
long as the Jewish nation existed, however feeble 
a remnant it might appear, the deliverance and 
glory of the chosen people under its Divine 
Leader would remain the central point of faith, 
at any rate with a large proportion of the 
disciples.— The Jewish nation was bloodily ex- 
tinguished under Hadrian, in 135. Up to that 
date, it seems quite certain that there was a sect 
of Palestinian Christians who looked distinctly to 
see a restoration of the " Kingdom unto Israel/' 
under the risen and triumphant Messiah. After 
that date, this hope was definitely blotted out, 
and the independent growth of Christian doctrine, 
as distinct from a more or less altered and 
spiritualized Judaism, may be said to have begun. 
The year 135 is to be taken, then, as the crisis 
which established Christian doctrine as an inde- 
pendent force in shaping the religious opinions of 
mankind/' 

Whether or not Justin wrote independently of 
the Fourth Gospel, we do not know, but what 
he said of the Logos was "probably the first 
attempt at a formal statement of the Logos- 
doctrine as a cardinal point in Christian theology ; 
the Proem to the Fourth Gospel being an 
eloquent and noble religious expression of the 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 4:1 



same general thought." "Justin's doctrine of the 
Word completes and follows out Paul's doctrine 
of the Spirit." 

" Before all created things/' wrote Justin in 
140 (?), " God begot from himself a certain mighty 
Word, which is also called Holy Spirit, or Glory 
of the Lord, sometimes Son, sometimes Wisdom, 
sometimes Angel, sometimes God, and sometimes 
Lord or Word." " One article of our faith there 
is," he wrote again, " that Christ is the first be- 
gotten of God, and we have already proved him to 
be the very Logos, (or universal Reason), of which 
mankind are all partakers ; and therefore those 
who live according to the Logos are Christians, not- 
withstanding they may pass with 3^011 for atheists." 
A more definite statement of his faith, one in 
which there is a noticeable juxtaposition of objects 
of worship was as follows : — " We worship and 
adore Him, (God), and the Son who came forth 
from Him and taught us these things, and the 
host of other angels who follow and are made 
like him, and the prophetic Spirit." Justin's 
Logos doctrine did not reach the sole exaltation 
to which in after decades it was carried, but it 
indicates the upward movement of Christian faith. 
Justin is thought to have been rather closer to 
the Jewish Roman line of thought than to the 
Greek. 

&. The Germ of the Doctrine of the 
Trinity. Athenagoras, 176. — Athenagoras was an 



42 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



Athenian philosopher, who wrote an Apology for 
the Christians, addressed to the Emperor Marcus 
Aurelius. He made this noteworthy declaration, 
"The Son is in the Father and the Father is in the 
Son, by oneness and power of the Spirit. The Son 
of God is the Mind and Reason of the Father." 

6\ The Germ of the Doctrine of the 
Supremacy of the Church. Irenaeus, 175- 
202. — Before the authority of the councils, assem- 
bled from the churches, was established, Christian 
thought was as individual and free as it is to-day. 
Each Christian writer legitimately supported his 
own doctrines, and had equal right with his fellow 
believers to a hearing from all. Irenaeus, how- 
ever, ascribed supreme authority to the Church at 
Rome, as the true deposit of Apostolical succession, 
and of Christian faith. A glimpse through his 
writings at the growing faith, at least in the 
Western Churches, is given in his confession of 
belief, in " One God Almighty, of whom are all 
things, and in the Son of God, Jesus Christ our 
Lord, by whom are all things, and His dispensa- 
tions by which the Son of God became man ; also 
a firm trust in the Spirit of God who hath set 
forth the dispensations of the Father and the Son, 
dwelling with each successive race of men, as the 
Father willed." 



EVOLUTION AND METAMOKPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 43 



THE THIRD CENTURY. 

1 . Th e Beg inn h igs of Emph a s is i ipoi i 
Vevsonal Consciousness of Sin. Tertullian, 
died 220. A converted Roman lawyer, impressed 
by a vivid sense of the supremacy of law, Tertullian, 
at the opening of the third century, when national 
disasters of many kinds had made the popular 
mood morbid and despondent, gave especial atten- 
tion to the fact of evil and the need of redemption. 
Yet, Neander says, "The same Tertullian who of all 
the Christian Fathers in the primitive age has most 
emphatically testified of the evil adhering to hu- 
man nature and its need of redemption, has also 
expressed in the strongest terms the consciousness 
of the original ineffable alliance to the divine in 
human nature." " What notion the soul is able to 
form respecting its original Teacher," wrote this 
Father, "it is in thy power to judge from that 
soul that is within thee.'' 

Tertullian's confession of faith is a clear mark 
of the rapidly denning Church Symbol. "The 
rule of faith is indeed altogether one, irremovable 
and irreformable; — One only God, omnipotent, the 
Maker of the Universe; and His Son Jesus Christ, 
born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius 
Pilate, raised again from the dead on the third 
day, received in the heavens, sitting now at the 
right hand of the Father, about to come to judge 
the quick and the dead, through the resurrection 
of the flesh as well (as of the spirit). 



44 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



2. Further Evolution of tJie JLorjos 
Doctr ine. Clement of Alexandria, 189-220. — Con- 
temporay with Tertullian at Rome, was Clement 
at Alexandria, the " Father of Greek Theology." 
Uppermost in his thought, was Justin's idea of the 
immanence of the Divine Word in the world and in 
the human soul. Redemption, to him is the result 
of the education of the human race by the universal, 
indwelling Teacher. u The Teacher of ours, O my 
children, is like to His Father, the God, of whom 
He is the sinless Son, — God unpolluted though in 
human form, the Divine Word, He that is in the 
Father, He that is on the right hand of the Father 
and in His form divine/ 5 " Naturally is man dear 
to God, seeing that he is His handywork. Man, 
He wrought by His own hands, and infused into 
him something that belongs to Himself." " All 
men are his. Some with the consciousness of what 
He is to them, others not as yet; some as friends, 
others as faithful servants ; others barely as ser- 
vants." Faith in the indwelling God, as the in- 
carnate Logos, is the source of all of Clement's 
hope for man's future, here and hereafter. 

3. The Doctrine of the Lor/os, and the 
Eternal Generation of the Son. Origen, 

186-254. — Whatever other contribution to the 
Patristic theology this successor of Clement made, 
he, certainly, carried the doctrine which became 
that of the Trinity, yet farther toward its full 
definition, by his attempt to reconcile his faith in 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 45 

"the original and indestructible Unity of God," 
and his faith in "the essential divinity of the 
Logos." He evolved the doctrine of of the neces- 
sary eternal generation, by the divine Subject, 
the Father, of a divine Object, the eternal Son, 
the Logos. The speculations he thus started were 
epoch making for the next century and longer. 
Yet, as showing the changes which took -place in 
his own mind, Origen at one time wrote: — "He 
who is God, of himself, is the God ; for which rea- 
son he says in his prayer to the Father, that they 
may know Thee, the only true God; but whatever 
is God besides Him, being God only by a com- 
munication of his divinity, cannot so properly be 
called < The God/ but rather f A God/ " 

4. The Doctrine of the Trinity taking 
Shape. Novatian, 250. — From the middle of third 
century to the time of the Council of Nicaea, the 
struggle concerning the permanent form, which 
Christian faith should take, grew more and more 
absorbing. That which became the Orthodox 
Creed was beset by heresies. The power of the 
Church at Rome steadily increased in the midst 
of the universal civil disorders then precipitated. 
From this period there remains, in a work on the 
"Trinity " by a Roman presbyter, who afterwards 
became an antipope, Novatian, the fragments of 
a creed which show how far, at Rome at least, 
Christian faith had been formulated. It required, 
"Faith in God the Father and Lord omnipotent 



46 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



the most perfect Maker of all things ; also in the 
Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord God } but Son 
of God ; also in the Holy Spirit." 

THE FOURTH CENTURY. 

1. The Orthodox Creed formulated 
and authorized. The Council at Nicaea, 325. — 
As the fourth century opened, the faith of the 
churches was profoundly disturbed by the con- 
tention of two powerful parties within the 
churches, known now as Sabellians and as Arians. 
The maturing faith in the Trinity was assailed 
on the one hand, by the advocates of a mystical 
belief in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as 
a trinity of divine attributes or manifestations, 
set forth by Sabellius. On the other hand, to save 
the Person of Christ from being thus absorbed in 
the Deit} r , Arius and his followers contended ve- 
hemently for the Christ's essential individuality, 
and His subordination to God, admitting, however, 
that Christ was of like substance with the Father, 
The Emperor Constantine, made emperor in 324, 
and having declared the empire Christian, deter- 
mined, if possible, to put an end to this disastrous 
struggle, and to bring peace to the State and to 
the churches. He therefore summoned the first 
(Ecumenical Council, which met the next year at 
Nicaea, near Constantinople. 

The result of the debates in that Council, was 
the promulgation of a Creed which is the .basis 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 47 



of what is now known as the u Catholic" and 
Orthodox" faith. In its original form it read as 
follows: — 

" We believe in One God, the Father Almighty, 
Maker of all things, both visible and invisible ; and 
in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begot- 
ten of the Father, (only begotten that is to say of 
the substance of the Father, God of God) and 
Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten 
not made, being of one substance with the Father, 
by whom all things were made, (both things in 
heaven and things on earth) ; who for us and for 
our salvation, came down and was made flesh, 
made man, suffered and rose again on the third 
day, went up into the heavens and is to come 
again to judge the quick and the dead ; and in the 
Holy Ghost." 

To this confession were added various anathe- 
mas of Arian doctrines, namely, that before the 
Christ " was begotten He was not ;" that, " He 
came into existence from what was not ;" and that, 
"He is of different Person or substance" from 
the Father. 

But this creed did not bring the hoped for 
peace. For a half century afterwards, what is 
known as the " Arian Controversy " was waged 
fiercely. 

Among the Orthodox adherents, the doctrine of 
the Holy Spirit was long a subject of bitter con- 
tention. The Nicene Creed declared faith simply 



48 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTOEY. 



"in the Holy Ghost." But whence came the Holy 
Ghost? At Constantinople; in 381, it was es- 
tablished that, He " proceeded from the Father." 
At the same time the faith was confirmed, that 
the Holy Ghost, " with the Father and the Son," 
are worshipped and glorified. Belief also in 
" one Catholic and Apostolic Church; one baptism 
for the remission of sins ; and expectation of the 
resurection of the dead; and the life of the world 
to come," were made standard doctrine. 

The Nicene Creed did not receive its finished 
form until in 589, when a council at Toledo in 
Spain, added the words "and the Son," to complete 
the Catholic doctrine of the procession of the 
Holy Ghost. This addition was never accepted 
by the Greek Church. But the Roman Church at 
length made it authoritative, and, in 1054, both the 
Greek and the Roman Churches excommunicated 
each other on account of their antagonism over 
this " Filio-que " clause. 

2. The Basis of the "Apostles' 99 Creed. 

The Creed of Marcellus, 336. — Where and when the 
so-called Creed of the Apostles, came into being, 
is not known. In ideas it antedates the Nicene 
confession, but its unquestionable existence does 
not appear before the middle of the eighth 
century. It may, however, be taken as a fair 
embodiment of the faith which was formulated in 
the Roman churches of the early centuries, in 
contradistinction to the faith of the churches of 



EVOLUTION AND M KTAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 49 

the Greek communion. The confession of Mar- 
cellus to the bishop of Rome, is the . earliest 
systematic approximation to the "Apostles' Creed. " 
Marcellus had labored earnestly at Nicaea for the 
Orthodox party. Afterwards he opposed the 
Arians so strongly, that he was accused of 
Sabellianism. He was deposed, and, in self- 
jus tificaiion, presented to the Head of the Roman 
Chui;ch, the following- Credo : — 

'X believe in God, the Father Almighty; and in 
Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, our Lord, 
who was born of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin 
Mary, who, under Pontius Pilate, was crucified 
and buried, and on the third day rose from the 
dead, ascended into heaven, and sittetk at the 
right hand of the Father, whence He is coming to 
judge the quick and the dead ; and in the Holy 
Ghost ; the Holy Church ; the remission of sins ; 
the resurrection of the flesh ; everlasting life." 
This faith,' Marcellus said, "be learnt and was 
taught from the Holy Scriptures." 

3. The Founder of Christian Cathol- 
icity. Athanasias, 296-373. — A true successor of 
Clement and of Origen, Athanasius rested his 
Christian faith on the immanence of God, and His 
manifestation as the eternal Reason. " This divine 
Logos," he wrote, "a being incorporeal, expands 
Himself in the universe as light expands in the air, 
penetrating all, and all entire, everywhere. He 
gives Himself without losing anything of Himself, 



50 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



and with Him is given the Father who makes all by 
Him, and the Spirit who is His energy. In order 
to know God, He must be looked for within the 
soul. In order to know the way which leads to 
God and to take it with certainty, we have no need 
of foreign aid, but of ourselves alone. The king- 
dom of God is within us." 

Applying this universal principle of the Divine 
Immanence to Christian tradition, Athanasius 
found the only satisfying solution for the problem 
before the Church, in the Unity in Trinity, of 
Father, Son and Holy Spirit. 

In this conviction, finally, the demands of the 
philosophy of the age, and the elements of 
Christian tradition, coalesced and issued in faith 
in a Triune God. The ideal of the Christ, as the 
Second Person of the Godhead, assumed into 
itself the Person of the Jesus of the Gospels. 
Christianity was thenceforth to unify both reason 
and tradition. Faith in the Son of God, and the 
principle of the Divine Immanence, were presented 
to the Church as in perfect harmony. Athanasius, 
when the work at Nicaea was finished, exultingly 
exclaimed; — "The Word of the Lord which was 
given in the CEcumenical Council of Nicaea re- 
maineth forever." 



EVOLUTION AND METAMOEPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 51 



THE FIFTH CENTURY. 
1. The Dogma of Original Sin and of 
Sacramental Grace. The Rise of the 
Church of Rome as Mediator between 
Christ and Man. Augustine, 355-430. — As 
we enter tbis century we see Christianity under- 
going yet another transformation, which, in the 
end, was almost farther reaching in its effects, 
than the. postulation of the Trinity of the God- 
head. There appeared as advocate of the Catholic 
faith, Augustine, a converted disciple of Mani- 
ch^ean Dualism. He was eminently orthodox in his 
Christology. (i Thy years are one day; Thy to-day 
is Eternity; therefore didst Thou beget the Co- 
eternal, to whom Thou saidst c This day have I 
begotten Thee. 5 " But, oppressed by a personal 
sense of sinfulness, and more or less prejudiced 
by his antecedent Manichsean conceptions of evil, 
evil, the origin of evil, and redemption, became 
the absorbing themes of his study and writings. 
In the Pelagian controversy, his emphasis upon 
the natural spiritual inability of man, confirmed, if 
it did not originate, a theory of human nature in 
which Christianity thitherto had had practically no 
interest, and which, thereafter, began to oppress 
Christendom. No other one mind has so pro- 
foundly pervaded the Christian Church, and shaped 
its views of the mutual relations of God and the 
soul. What was germinant with Tertullian became 
full grown and fruitful in Augustine's idea of 



52 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



human nature. In his dogma of original depravity, 
"humanity is absolutely separated from God in 
consequence of Adam's sin;" the divine image in 
man is gone. To Augustine, redemption concerns 
but a part of mankind and depends upon the 
unconditioned divine choice. The work of redemp- 
tion lies with the Church. By the rite of baptism 
the divine image is recreated. Even infants who 
have not been baptized are lost. Thus the office of 
the Church was magnified, and, by the merits he 
ascribed to the other sacraments, Augustine 
contributed in largest measure to the later 
supremacy of the Church ; to its supremacy not 
only in spiritual, but in secular affairs Princi- 
pal Tulloch says ; " Like his great disciple in 
a later age, — Luther — Augustine was prone to 
emphasize the side of truth which he had most 
realized in his own experience, and, in contradis- 
tinction to the Pelagian exaltation of human 
nature, to depreciate its capabilities beyond 
measure.' 5 Prof. A. V. G. Allen writes, "No point 
more clearly illustrates the degradation which 
Christian theology underwent at the hands of 
Augustine than his doctrine of grace. Christ as 
the invisible teacher of humanity, whose presence 
in the world, in the reason and the conscience of 
man, is the power by which men are delivered from 
sin and brought into the liberty of the children of 
God, gives way, in the system of Augustine, to an 
impersonal thing or substance which is known as 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 53 



grace. What is sometimes called the sacramental 
theology is based upon the Augustinian notion 
of grace, — the principle that man is built up in 
the spiritual life by a subtle quality conveyed to 
him from without through material agencies, 
rather than by evoking the divine that is within. 
Augustine was great in that he may be said to 
have made possible the career of the Latin 
Church. For a thousand years those who came 
after him did little more than reaffirm his teach- 
ing, and so deep is the hold which his long 
supremacy has left upon the church, that his 
opinions have become identified with divine 
revelation, and are all that the majority of the 
Christian world yet know of the religion of 
Christ. " 

THE MIDDLE AGES. 
1. Ultimate Statement of the Ortho- 
dox Doctrine of the Trinity; the Auto- 
cracy in Western Christendom of the 
JPapal Church. The "Athantman" Creed, 809. 
— Christianity, from the fifth to the fifteenth cen- 
tury, metamorphosed by the blended Nicene and 
Augustinian theology working through a system 
of sacraments, administered by an autocratic 
hierarchy, held sway over Western Christendom. 
During this period the perfected formulation of 
the Trinitarian theory of Christ's Person came into 
existence, under the name of the great Nicene 
Father, Athanasius. Just when, and by whom, this 



54 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTuKY. 



symbol was composed is not known. The records 
of the Church, however, show that at Friuli, in 796, 
the president of a council held there, Paulinus, 
said, ''In the records of some synods it is laid 
down that no one may lawfully teach or frame 
another symbol of our faith (than the Nicene). 
Far be it from us, to frame or teach another 
symbol or faith, or in another manner, than they 
(the Nicene Fathers) appointed. But, according 
to their meaning, we have decreed to deliver in 
exposition, those matters, which haply on account 
of the brief statement of the truth are less under- 
stood by the simple and unlearned than they 
ought to be.'* Within lifty years after this ad- 
dress, the so-called " Athanasian " Creed was in 
existence, recognized as an authoritative exposition 
of the Papal doctriue of the Trinity and the In- 
carnation. In parts it reads as follows : — 

"Whosoever will be saved, before all things it 
is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith ; which 
faith except every one do keep entire and inviolate, 
without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. 

Now the Catholic faith is this — that we worship 
one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity. 

Neither confounding the persons, nor dividing 
the substance. 

And in this Trinity there is nothing before or 
after, nothing greater or less, but the whole three 
Persons are co-eternal to one another, and co-equal. 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 55 

He therefore, that will be saved, must thus 
think of the Trinity. 

Furthermore, it is necessary to everlasting salva- 
tion, that he also believe rightly the incarnation 
of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Now the right faith is, that we believe and con- 
fess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, 
is both God and Man. 

He is God of the substance of his Father, be- 
gotten before the world ; and he is Man of the 
substance of his mother, born in the world. 

Perfect God and perfect Man ; of a rational 
soul, and h uman flesh subsisting. 

Equal to the Father according to his Godhead, 
and less than the Father according to his Man- 
hood. 

One Christ, one not by the conversion of the 
Godhead into flesh, but by the taking of the 
Manhood unto God. 

This is the Catholic faith, which except a man 
believe faithfully and steadfastly, he cannot be 
saved." 

The theory concerning the Church is embodied 
in a " Papal Rule," from which we learn, with 
many other decrees, — 

1. " That Christ has established a Church upon 
earth, and that this Church is that which holds 
communion with the see of Rome, being one, holy, 
catholic, and apostolical. 



'56 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



2, That we are obliged to hear this Church ; 
and, therefore, that she is infallible, by the 
guidance of Almighty God, in her decisions re- 
garding faith. 

3. That the pope or bishop of Borne, as suc- 
cessor to St. Peter, has always been, and is at 
present, by divine right, Head of this Church." 

With this creed, and this assumption of Divine 
right and power for the Church, Christianity, as 
the evolution of the revelation of a transcendent 
Triune Deity, entrusted to and interpreted by an 
infallible human Agent, reached a consummate 
expression and its ultimate limit. 

2. The Medieval Theology.— The best 
authoritative summary of Christian doctrines in 
the Middle Ages, is embodied in the decrees of 
the Council of Trent. This council met in the 
sixteenth century for the purpose of counteracting 
the influence of the Protestant Reformation, but its 
decrees were only a specific reiteration of the 
articles of faith which, had reached full authoriza- 
tion before the year 1300, the year of the great 
Jubilee, when Pope Boniface VIIL caused to be 
celebrated, the absolute sovereignty, in Western 
Europe, of the Papal Church. The opening para- 
graph of the Tridentine decrees is a repetition and 
reaffirmation of the tenets of the Nicene Creed. 
Upon this introduction, follow dogmas -and in- 
terpretations, many fold larger than the funda- 
mental Creed, the result of the-worlq of the -Churclr 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 57 



of the Empire during its growth to its position 
as the imperial Church. From these decrees it 
appears that the Medieval Theology means, 
besides the confessions of the Nicene Creed, 
all the Apostolical, Patristic and other traditions 
authorized by the Church. They teach that the 
Holy Scriptures, are infallibly true and binding 
upon faith ; that the Bible is true according to the 
sense in which the Holy Church holds it ; and 
that it is never to be interpreted otherwise than 
iii accordance with the unanimous agreement of 
the Fathers. A large part of the utterances of the 
Tridentine Council is devoted to the doctrine of 
Human Nature and the w r ork of Christ. It is 
explicitly taught in them, that mankind are totally 
ruined, as the effect of Adam's fall, and that there 
is no salvation for any one upon whom the merits 
of Christ's work have not been bestowed, and 
who has not accepted them. Further, the decrees 
declare that there are seven sacraments necessary 
to human salvation, although not all of them are 
necessary for every one. Baptism is the first of 
these sacraments. This is absolutely necessary for 
all mankind. The other sacraments are confirma- 
tion, the eucharist, penance, extreme unction, holy 
orders and matrimony. The center of Medieval 
Theology is the doctrine of the Eucharist or the 
ILord's Supper, namely, "In the mass there is 
offered to God, a true, proper and propitiatory 
sacrifice for the living and the dead, and in the 



58 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



Most Holy Sicrament of the Eucharist there is 
truly, really and substantially, the body and blood, 
together with the soul and divinity of our Lord 
Jesus Christ ; and that a change is made of the 
whole essence of the bread into the body, and of 
the whole essence of the wine into the blood, and 
that partaking of either bread or wine, the com- 
municant receives Christ whole and entire." 
Among the sacraments, penance is set forth as of 
great importance. Confession must be made, pen- 
ance suffered and absolution received, under decree 
of the divinely authorized Church. The doctrine 
of Purgatory is declared to be true, and " souls in 
Purgatory detained, are helped by the suffrages of 
the faithful." The saints reigning with Christ are 
to be honored and invoked ; they offer up prayers 
for men ; their relics are to be hold in veneration. 
The images of Christ, and of the perpetual Virgin, 
the Mother of God, and also of other saints, ought 
to be had and retained and honored and revered. 
The Power of Indulgence, it was claimed, had 
been left to the Church by Christ, and the use of 
it is most wholesome to Christian people. The 
Tridentine decrees close, by acknowledging the 
Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church as the 
Mother and Mistress of all Churches ; and by 
swearing obedience to tho Bishop of Rome, as 
the successor of St Peter, Prince of the Apostles 
and Vicar of Jesus Christ. 

It should be constantly kept in mind, in glancing 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 59 



at this stupendous structure of the Christian 
Church of the Middle Ages, that, underneath its 
teachings, is the fundamental notion inherited 
from a far past, that God and the world and man 
are not essentially connected except through 
Christ. " God created all things out of nothing," 
was the doctrine of the Church. In the decrees 
of the Vatican Council of 1870, we read; — - cc The 
one only true God to manifest his perfection, with 
absolute freedom of counsel, created out of nothing, 
from the very first being of time, both the spiritual 
and corporeal creatures, and afterwards the human 
creature as partaking in a sense of both, consist- 
ing of soul and body." In the Middle Ages, the 
philosophic servants of the Church, the Scholastics, 
labored hard to prove the absolute eternity and 
infinity of God, and the process of the universe 
from God, and, at the same time, the undivineness 
and essential separateness of creation from God. 
By the Schoolmen, it was held that the human 
soul can be called divine, only in the sense that it 
is God's creature. Essential divinity for man, is 
to be found only in that union of man with God 
which is secured by man's receiving the substance 
of the God-man, Christ. Hence, in the Medieval 
Theology the awful importance of the celebration 
of the Lord's Supper, at which, the essential Deity, 
through transubstantiated bread and wine, is 
believed to be received into, and assimilated by, 
the human soul. 



60 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



3. Scholasticism. Reason consecrated 
to the Service of Dogma. — The three cen- 
turies, of 450-750, are called the "Dark Ages." 
Barbarism, by force of arms, had crushed the 
Roman Empire, and during these centuries, the 
Roman Church, by its spiritual force had in turn 
conquered barbarism. The teachers of the schools 
established among the barbarians, in the seventh 
and eighth centuries, were called scholastici. The 
schoJastici were dominated by Church dogma. 
They taught by the processes of what was then 
known of Aristotle's Logic The influence of these 
logicians rapidly increased, and, from the ninth 
century, formal logic, as the discoverer and illum- 
inator of truth, gained practical control of the 
monasteries and the cathedral schools. About 
that time one fundamental question became the 
center of Scholastic thought. That was, "Are 
what are called universal ideas real? Are they 
things, or names?" Towards the tenth century 
this question, almost to the exclusion of other 
problems, absorbed the intellectual energy of 
Western Europe. The general tendency of the 
Church authorities, was towards the theory that 
there are universal ideas existing really and 
independently of the separate things. The con- 
troversy, now known as that of Nominalism and 
Realism, did not, however, seriously disturb the 
Church until the eleventh century was well ad- 
vanced, when Roscellin, a Nominalist, so chalieng- 



EVOLUTION AND METAMOKPHOSES 07 CHRISTIANITY. 61 

ed the Realists in a discussion concerning the 
Trinity, that his views were condemned as hereti- 
cal. Roscellin was the first logician who actually 
came into conflict with the Church, which at 
that time was rapidly establishing itself as the 
civil and spiritual dictator of Europe. The chief 
opponent of Roscellin, and the champion of the 
Church, was another Scholastic, Anselm. With 
Anselm, Scholastic Realism, we may say, became 
the avowed servant of the Church. His dictum, 
" I believe in order that I may understand/ 3 was 
epoch making. Nominalism was condemned, and 
thenceforward, for three hundred years, Scholas- 
ticism and Scholastic Realism were identified. 
The Schoolmen, thenceforward, devoted their in- 
tellectual energy to putting Medieval Theology 
into logical forms. Then, for the Roman Catholic 
Church, the doctrine that Faith directs Reason 
was established. In the Papal Syllabus of 18G4, 
we read ; (; Those who s&j that the methods 
and principles by which the scholastic doctors 
cultivated theology, are no longer suitable to the 
demands of the age and the progress of science, 
are anathema." The main work of Scholasticism 
was to comprehend revealed truth, and to ratio- 
nalize the fixed creed of the Holy Catholic Church 
of Rome. 

But, Sclrwegler says, " notwithstanding all this, 
Scholasticism was not without excellent results. 
Although completely in the service of the Church, 



62 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



it originated in a scientific interest, and awoke 
consequently, the spirit of free inquiry and a love 
of knowledge. It converted objects of Faith into 
objects of thought ; and even when it sought to 
establish by argument the authority of Faith, it 
was really establishing, contrary to its own know- 
ledge and will, the authority of Reason." 

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

The Renaissance. Philosophy sepa- 
rated from Dogma. Reason placed 
above Church Authority. — In the four- 
teenth century, Nominalism was revived and the 
foundations of Scholastic dogmatism were de- 
stroyed. In the fifteenth century occurred the 
" Revival of Letters." Gradually, ' 1 the free, 
universal, thinking spirit of antiquity was born 
afresh." In many directions there was rebirth, — 
in Philosophy, Science, Art, State, Church, — re- 
generations threatening general social revolution. 
In State and Church, Wyclif, Huss, Jerome, and 
Savonarola, had led revolts against the assumptions 
of Rome. The art of printing was developed, by 
which the products of the new thought were scat- 
tered everywhere; the hidden Bible was brought 
to light ; a new T world across the seas was dis- 
covered ; a new maritime path to the Far East 
was traversed ; a new and true theory of the 
place of the earth among the stars was maturing. 
A new age for mankind was at hand, styled by 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 63 

Michelet, " the discover}' of the world and the 
discovery of man." 

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

1. The Reformation. Protest against 
the Autocracy of the Church; Restora- 
tion of the Bible to Private Judgment. — 

The Church of Rome never seemed stronger 
than when this century opened. Hitherto, all 
heretics, the heralds of the new age, had been 
easily overcome by the Papal Church. But a 
slight allegiance held a large part of Christendom 
to the temporal lordship of the Pope of Rome. 
When Luther nailed his theses to the church door 
in Wittenberg, in 1517, the avenging hand of the 
Church found itself stayed by the power of a 
German State. The break, once begun, did not 
cease until half of Christendom had been severed 
from the temporal dominion of the Papacy. 

Bunsen, reviewing the Protestant Reformation, 
found in it five distinguishing marks : — 

1. The whole company of faithful people and 
not the clergy alone, constitute the Church. 

2. The whole Church is the deposit of Man's 
consciousness of God. 

3. The collective community ought to represent 
a people of God. 

4. There is no difference between religious acts 
and secular acts. 

5. A. personal faith is the condition of inward 
peace with God. But this personal faith necessarily 



64 



CHRISTIANITY IN HIST O it Y. 



involves free conviction, and therefore free inquiry 
and free speculation on the results thereof, though 
carried on under a sense of responsibility to God ; 
and this again presupposes freedom of conscience 
and thought. 

2c The Theology of the Reformation: 
substantially a Reaffirmation of Medie- 
val Doctrine* — The leaders of the Reformation 
were affected by the same forces which had set 
Stale, Science, Art and many other institutions and 
agencies of society, free. The religious movement 
immediately under their direction, however, is not 
to be considered as inclusive of all the religious 
emancipation of the time. The men who are known 
as "the Reformers,' 5 limited their right of private 
judgment by the Bible. They revolted from the 
Church in order to give perfect allegiance to what 
they believed was the written word of God. The 
theology which they made their standard was, for 
the most part, the same as that under which 
the} 7 had been reared, the theology of the Roman 
Church. They believed : — 

1. In the doctrine of the Trinity, as set forth in 
the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds ; 

2. In the universality of God's eternal purposes, 
and also the free agency of man ; 

3. In the natural and entire depravity of man ; 

4. In the atonement made by Jesus Christ, 
through which, alone, human salvation is pos- 
sible ; 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 65 



5. In instantaneous regeneration, by special 
operation of the Holy Spirit ; 

6. In justification by faith in Christ. 

All the creeds of the Reformed Churches received 
these articles in one or another form, with greater 
or less modification. They constitute, what may 
be termed, the Theology of the Reformation. 

For the rest, in forms of Church government, 
in the number and meaning of the sacraments 
and in the modes of their administration, and in 
some less important matters, the Churches of the 
Reformation differed from one another, and from 
the Mother Church. 

3. The Lines of Evolution of the He- 
formed Theology, Luther, 1483-1546 ; Calvin, 
1509-1564; Arminius, 1560-1609. — It is not possible 
within our narrow limits -to follow the course 
of the Theology of the Reformation. It covers 
a period of more than three hundred years. It 
includes the histories of scores of Christian 
denominations ; some of them now receiving 
millions of earnest adherents ; many of them 
widely .separateel from one another by their differ- 
ences of faith and practice, but all bound together 
by what they name the Evangelical Orthodox faith, 
summarized above. 

The Churches which bear Luther's name, have, 
by profession, departed least, among Protestant 
bodies, from the faith matured in the Middle ilges. 
In practice, too, they stand nearest to the Roman 



66 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



Church, by the doctrine of Consubstantiation, or 
the Real Presence of the body and blood of 
Christ with the bread and wine of the Eucharist. 

The Augsburg Confession, (1530,) it is to be 
noted in passing, is silent on the doctrine of 
Predestination. 

The theology formulated by Calvin, was em- 
bodied in the creeds of so many Protestant 
Churches, that it is often spoken of as the re- 
presentative Reformed Theology. The list of 
Calvinistic creeds is too long to enumerate here. 
It includes the Westminster Confession, the Heid- 
elberg Catechism, the Articles of the Synod of 
Dort, the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of 
England, and the confessions of various important 
Independent and Congregational denominations. 

Calvinism is An gustinianism continued with an 
intensified meaning. Its distinguishing peculiarity 
lies in its views of Human Nature and of the 
Divine Decrees. 

1. Human Nature. All mankind by Adam's fall 
lost communion with God, are under his wrath 
and curse, and so made liable to all the miseries 
of this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell 
forever. 

2. Divine Decrees. Concerning these, Calvin 
wrote; — " We assert that by an eternal and immut- 
able counsel, God has once for all, determined 
both whom he would admit to salvation and whom 
he would condemn, to destruction. We affirm that 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 67 

that this counsel, so far as it concerns the Elect, 
is founded on his gratuitous mercy, totally irres- 
pective of human merit ; but that to those whom 
he devotes to condemnation, the way of life is 
closed by his own just and irreprehensible — but 
incomprehensible — judgment." 

Arminius was educated a Calvinist, but he 
gradually came to doubt the truth of Calvin's 
doctrine of decrees and grace. He taught instead, 
a conditional election and reprobation, dependent 
upon divine foreknowledge. The great Methodist 
Episcopal denomination and its branches, are typi- 
cal Arminian bodies. 

4. 'Development of Rationalism. Gior- 
dano Bruno, 1548-1600. Boehm, 1575-1624. Lord 
Bacon, 1561-1626. Descartes, 1596-1650.— With the 
decay of Scholasticism, emancipated Eeason began 
a career independent of ecclesiastical dogma. In 
its relation to the sciences, Eeason at length took 
form in what is known as the Baconian Method. 
In its application to the human consciousness, it 
became the source of Modern Philosophy, through 
the speculations of Descartes. Prophetic of the 
new dominion of the Eeason, there had lived in 
Italy, the martyr Bruno. He thought of God as 
the soul of the world. In Germany there had 
been Jacob Boehm, who anticipated much of the 
faith of a later day, in his mystic vision of all the 
world as but a perpetual outflow from the eternal 
One. 



68 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



The Protestant Reformers, although they had 
transferred their allegiance from the Church 
to the Bible, and to the Bible only, were them- 
selves more or less affected by the growing 
Rationalism. Luther was noticeably free in his 
judgments of the relative values of the books of the 
Bible. His acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity 
was purely an act of obedience to tradition. 
" The Trinity " he said <c is a heavenly thing which 
the world cannot understand. The schools have 
devised many distinctions, dreams and fancies, 
by which they have tried to set forth the Trinity, 
and have thus become fools/' Melancthon had a 
forefeeling of what was coming. " In reference to 
the Trinity, I have always feared," he wrote, (C that 
these things would break out again. What dis- 
turbances will be raised in the next age whether 
the Logos and the Holy Spirit are hypostases." 
Zwingli, the Swiss Reformer, 1484-1531, while 
orthodox in regard to the Trinity, declared that, 
" Religion has not been confined within the 
boundaries of Palestine, since God did not create 
Palestine only ; he created the whole world/' and, 
"If the question be put, Did Christ restore the 
whole human family or only the church of believers? 
I answer, Christ brought by his salvation as much 
good into the world, as Adam by his sinning 
brought evil." Zwingli showed, we are told, a deci- 
ded tendency towards belief in universal salvation. 
How far Rationalism had entered the circle of 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 69 

those even, who accepted the Bible as the Word 
of God, may be seen in the letter of CEcolampadius 
to Servetus, in 1530; "You do not admit that it 
was the Son of God who w r as to come as man, but 
that it w T as the man who came that was the Son of 
God." Dr. J. H. Allen writes, of Faustus Socinus, 
that towards the close of the sixteenth century, 
" He denied the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the 
personality of the devil, the native and total 
depravity of man, the vicarious atonement and the 
eternity of punishment. His theory was, that 
Christ was a man divinely commissioned, who had 
no existence before He was conceived by the 
virgin Mary ; that human sin was the imitation of 
Adam's sin, and that human salvation was the 
imitation and adoption of Christ's virtue ; that 
the Bible was to be interpreted by human reason." 

Our interest, however, lies chiefly by that move- 
ment at the close of the Middle Ages, by which the 
Reason w r as consciously made the supreme arbiter 
of religious beliefs. That movement received its 
first definite and systematic character, in the 
speculations of Descartes, after whom came 
Spinoza, to whom directly the chief formative 
force in what may be styled Modern Theology, 
as we shall see, may be traced. 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 
1. Further Development of Ration- 
alism. Rationalistic Interpretation of 
the Bible. English Arianism : Puritan- 
ism: JPlatonism: Scepticism: Deism. 
Locke, 1632-1704. Milton, 1608-1674. Cromwell, 1599- 
1658. Cudivorth, 1617-1688. Hbbbes, 1588-1679.— No 
radical change in recognized Christian theology 
took place during this century. The characteristic 
doctrines of the Reformation remained dominant 
influences. One noticeable sign of the time, how- 
ever, appeared in England ; an increasing tend- 
ency among numbers of professed Christians, to 
criticise traditional theology, wholly upon the 
basis of an unprejudiced interpretation of the 
Scriptures, and to seek to restore to the world 
primitive Christianity. The representative product 
of this tendency, was Locke's " Reasonableness of 
Christianity." It has been said that Locke's 
"rationalizing temper slid easily to what is often 
claimed as the Unitarian dogma. It was, really, ci 
form of Arianism, like Milton's. And, like his, it 
was the result of a literal rendering of texts, without 
any conscious naturalistic bias, or any suspicion of 
what at this day we should call a rationalizing 
criticism. The Arianism of Locke had a great 
and immediate effect on English thought, and 
is reflected pretty constantly in the Anglican 
theology for a century or more." Locke's "method 
of investigation was the very simple and obvious 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 71 



one, — which only needed that clear, sagacious 
and honest understanding to suggest — to search 
the record, and by the canons of plain sense to 
determine what Christianity is. 

"The answer is simple. It is, that Jesus is the 
Messiah in the precise and literal sense in which 
he was announced to the Jewish people. Only, 
we must interpret that sense to the understanding 
of our day. So interpreted, it will mean that he 
is the Divinely appointed sovereign of human life, 
especially of conscience and conduct, which are 
the ultimate thing in human life." 

Also, in England in this century, Puritanism was 
at the zenith of its devotion and influence. Rigid 
as was their hold on the faith of the Genevan 
Reformer, no body of men ever insisted more on 
man's right to worship God after the dictates of 
his own conscience than the Puritans, however 
little their practice towards differing believers 
harmonized with their claim. The spirit of the 
new age was steadily emancipating State and 
Church. "The Christian Commonwealth" passed 
through a brief career in England, and was borne 
across the sea to America. The Pilgrim Fathers set 
sail from Holland for the new world of the West, 
and John Robinson, as they departed, assured 
them; — "More light is yet to break from God's 
word. " The Pilgrim Fathers, James Russell Lowell 
wrote, " had a conception (which those will call 
grand who regard simplicity as a necessary element 



72 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



of grandeur) of founding a commonwealth on 
those two eternal bases of Faith and Works ; they 
had indeed no revolutionary ideas of universal 
liberty, but yet what answered the purpose quite 
as well, abiding faith in the brotherhood of Man 
and the Fatherhood of God." It w r as in this 
century that Milton, prophetic of the inevitable 
advance of Christianity to higher and larger forms, 
declared, " Now once again, by all the concur- 
rences of signs and by the general instinct of holy 
and devout men, God is decreeing to begin some 
new and great period in his Church, even to the 
reforming of the Reformation itself." The master 
poet divined better than he intended. 

Along with the struggle in England, between 
the new Ecclesiasticism of the State Church 
and the new Protestantism of the Dissenters, 
"Natural Religion" and a "Skeptical Philosophy" 
started upon memorable developments. Deism, 
"which Dr. Otto Pfleiderer defines, as " a system 
which conceives God as the thinking and willing 
'highest being', and ascribes to the world such 
an independence of existence and activity as 
against God, that God comes to stand on the 
same footing with the finite beings of the world, 
as a being like them " began with Lord Herbert, 
the career which so deeply stirred the scholarship 
and the popular mood of the following century. 
Thomas Hobbes, by his philosophical specula- 
tions, led a barren, materialistic empiricism which 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 73 



left English thought for a long time afterwards 
without inspiration. 

In England, in this century also, an unsuccess- 
ful attempt at the opening up anew of the sublime 
vision of Plato, was made by Cudworth and 
More, both ignorant of the f 'God intoxication" of 
one mightier and truer than Plato, who was then 
suffering for his faith in Holland. 

The seventeenth century is especially noteworthy, 
for the initiation in England, in Religion and in 
Philosophy, of widely divergent tendencies under 
the rationalizing spirit of the new age, yet under 
the influence of Medieval theologic speculation. 

2. Emancipated Philosophic nation- 
alism in Germany. 'Permanent Re- 
storation of the Idea of the Unity of the 
Universe. Spinoza, 1632-1677. — The seventeenth 
century is memorable in the history of Christianity, 
for the permanent recovery of a principle in Philo- 
sophy, by which Christianity, at length, renewed 
the development which had been checked at the 
time Augustinianism mastered the Church of Rome. 
Spinoza's words, " It is not absolutely necessary to 
salvation to know Christ after the flesh : but it is 
altogether otherwise if we sp>eak of the Son of God, 
that is, the eternal "Wisdom of God, which is man- 
ifested in all things, and chiefly in the human soul, 
and most of all in Jesus Christ," were prophetic of 
the future dominant conviction in Christian con- 
sciousness. Dr. Hedge declared that "the result 



74 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



of Spinoza's influence, — by the fructification of 
his idea in the thoughts and feelings of the 
thinking and cultured minds of our time, — may 
be summed up, as emancipation from the Dualism 
and the Anthropomorphism of the old popular 
faith. Spinoza has given us a God who is not an 
individual secluded and remote, — a regent en- 
throned above the skies, — but an all present reality. 
In his attempt to establish this beneficent verity, 
he sacrifices the proper personality of God. But 
this very extreme has contributed more effectually, 
perhaps, than a more theistic view would have 
done, to correct the opposite error. And this 
false extreme is not essential, I think, to the 
central and constitutive principle of the £ Ethiea.' 
Unity of substance is not incompatible with the 
creation, by self-limitation, of individual ex- 
istences having separate consciousnesses, and 
therefore distinct persons ; whereby the person- 
ality of God is maintained, in the one essential 
article of a conscious and moral relation to others. 
The strength of Spinozism is the quickened sense 
which, by its emancipation from Dualism and 
Anthropomorphism, it gives us of the all pervad- 
ing and immediate presence of God. The divine 
Omnipresence, once a cold, unmeaning dogma, it 
has made a fact of consciousness." Schwegler, 
commenting upon Spinoza's thought, wrote, " It is 
the most abstract monotheism that can possibly 
be conceived. ' It is not by accident, that* 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 75 



Spinoza, a Jew, has, in explanation of the Universe, 
once more revived the idea of its absolute unity : 
such idea is, in some sort, a consequence of his 
nationality, an echo of the East. " 

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

1. Deistie and Skeptical Development 
of Rationalism in England. The Evan- 
gelical Revival. Extension of Avian 
and Socin ian Tlnitarianisin. Hume, 1711- 
1776. Wesley, 1703-1791. Priestley, 1733-1804 — 
Before following the evolution of the idea which 
has been operative in the modern metamorphosis 
of Christianity, — the restored idea of the im- 
manence of God in the world, and in man, — let us 
glance at the culmination and decline of the unil- 
lumined rationalism associated with the Medieval 
Theology, and the emotional reaction from it 
shown in Evangelical Revivalism. 

" The eighteenth century occupies a large and 
important place in the history of Christian 
thought. The traditional theology, as it had 
developed in the Latin Church, and as it had 
descended, unchanged in its fundamental aspects, 
to the Protestant theologians of the seventeenth 
century, was now compelled to enter into a con- 
flict with human reason. To some it appears as 
if inspired by an evil agency for the destruction 
of the truth ; to others a necessary part in a divine 
process by which God was taking away the old 



76 



CHRISTIANITY* IN HISTORY. 



that He might establish the new." The con- 
troversy cleared the way for a new view of Christ- 
ianity. It compelled the study of the historical 
evidences of Christianity and of Biblical interpreta- 
tion. Much that had been held in connection 
with both these studies thitherto, was thenceforth 
made untenable. Associated with, and in large 
part the result of, the English controversy, was the 
spread of a calamitous infidelity and materialism 
in France ; a general loosening of the creedal 
bonds of the English Established Church ; the 
enthusiastic affirmation of the direct influence of 
the Holy Spirit upon the human soul, under the 
preaching of Wesley and Whitefield '; and the 
substitution of a serene, unim passioned Arian and 
Socinian Unitarianism. for the rigid and severe 
Calvinism of many Presbyterian and Baptist 
Churches, under the persuasion of Dr. Priestley 
and Joseph Lindsey. 

The changes taking place in England extended 
to other countries. In America especially, many 
men prominent in the organization of the new 
republic were under the influence of the skeptical 
rationalism of the Deists. In America, the move- 
ment started by John Wesley attained a wonderful 
impetus among the people. And in America, 
the revived Arianism and Socinianism gained a 
hold among the ministers and the people of the 
churches of the Puritans and Pilgrims which was 
maintained well into the present century, when 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 77 



it gradually yielded to a higher, more ideal 
Unitarian faith. 

2. Preparation for a New Advance in 
the Evolution of Christian ity. German 
Illuminism* Moravian Pietism. Leasing, 
1729-1781. Count Zinzendorf 1700-1760.— The idea 
which Spinoza brought hack to philosophy was not 
left to perish, or to be ineffective. For a time, it 
was neither honored nor used. But the eighteenth 
century produced a man who discerned in that 
idea, the promise and power of a truer Christianity 
than the world had known for many centuries. 
"Under the influence of Spinoza, Lessing disowned 
the prevailing theological conception of a God out- 
side the world." And more than that ; Lessing's 
faith in the Providence of the immanent God, 
disclosed to him a thought, which, since his time, 
has become one of the most fruitful truths cherish- 
ed for both Science and Religion, c< The Education 
of the Human Race." "What education is to the 
individual, that revelation is to mankind," are the 
pregnant words with which Lessing opened his 
creative essay. In Stahr's "Life of Lessing'' we 
read, "'Lessing stands for all coming ages as the 
true hero of the illuminism of his century. 

The mediation between revelation and reason, 
he discovered in an idea not foreign to the old 
Church Fathers : in the idea of the realization of 
the truths of revelation by their gradual trans- 
formation into the truths of the reason, to fulfil 



78 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



the divine plan of the education of the human 
race." How fruitful was the seed sown by this 
German illuminist, we shall see hereafter. 

Meanwhile, let us turn attention to a small com- 
munity dwelling in Saxony, a people marked by a 
peculiarly fervent and gentle piety. They were 
known as the " Moravian Brethren/' and were under 
the patronage of a singularly pure minded noble- 
man, Count Zinzendorf. The Moravians were in 
faith descendants of John Huss, martyred by the 
Council of Constance for heresy : heresy which 
arose from his consecration to the Christ of the 
Gospels, rather than to the authority of the Pope. 
In the preceding century, the "Brethren" had suf- 
fered with Unitarians and other Protestants, in the 
Roman Catholic persecution which silenced dissent 
in Bohemia. For a time they had preserved their 
faith in secret retreats, but later had found refuge 
upon *~the estate of the pious German Count. 
Among other beneficent agencies which they con- 
ducted in their new home, were schools in which, 
with ordinary learning, the deepest and purest 
religious principles were inculcated. Some Mora- 
vian missionareis had profoundly affected the 
career of John Wesley. The Moravian schools at 
Niesky and Barby, were to affect even more pro- 
foundly, the career of the apostle of a renewed 
Christianity in the present century. Freidrich 
Daniel Schleiermacher, when a child, was placed 
under the care of the Moravian Brethren. 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 79 

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

1. A New Advance of Christianity 
through th e Reunion of Philosophic Ra- 
tionalism and Faith. Schleiermacher, 1768- 
1834. — "All the profounder schools of religious 
thought in this century date, it is said, from 
Schleiermacher." Ee vie wing his mental character, 
Dr. Otto Pfleiderer says, ' 1 Herrnhutisfc piety, Leib- 
nizian illumination, Kantian criticism, Fichtean 
idealism, Schelling's philosophy of identity, Spi- 
noza's pantheism and Plato's dialectics, — all 
entered into Schleiermacher's thought." His 
father, an army chaplain, a faithful Galvinist in 
creed, had urged his son, when troubled with 
speculative questionings, to study Lessing, especi- 
ally " The Education of the Human Race' 3 During 
his university course, Schleiermacher was an eager 
and omnivorous student of whatever bore upon 
religious thought and life. He was rapidly freed 
from both the popular theology and philosophy 
of his day. He examined, and was dissatisfied 
with, the old metaphysics. He accepted for a 
time, Fiehte's idealism. At length, he found in 
Spinoza, that which his mind needed to. give it 
rest. " Spinoza's contemplation of all finite ex- 
istences under the form of eternity and unity, and 
his willing surrender to the orderly regularity of 
the universe, brought him freedom from passion 
and error and the blessedness of intellectual love 
of God." In his "Discourses on Religion" Schleier- 



80 CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 

maclier paid this homage to the obscure prophet 
of the higher faith of the emancipated Reason. 
"Join with me in reverently offering a tribute to 
the manes of the holy and rejected Spinoza ! Him 
the lofty world-spirit penetrated, the Infinite was 
his beginning and end, the universe his only' and 
infinite love. In holy innocence and deep humility, 
he reflected himself in the eternal world and saw 
how he in turn was its chosen mirror. Full of 
religion was he, and full of the Holy Spirit, and 
therefore he stands alone and un appro ached, — a 
master in his art, but exalted above the profane 
herd of those who practise it ; without disciples and 
without citizenship." The discipleship of Schleier- 
macher was not however to the letter of Spinoza's 
doctrine. It was, says Dr. Pfleiderer, " a modified 
and spiritualized Spinozism, the same that we 
encounter in Lessing, Herder and Goethe." In 
Prof. A. V. G. Allen's "Continuity of Christian 
Thought" the value of Sehleiermacher's work is 
thus estimated; — ''In Schleiermacher we have 
also, for the first time since the days of Greek 
theology, a representative theologian of the 
highest intellectual capacity who had drunk 
deeply at the springs of Greek £3hilosophy and 
culture." "Against the cold idea of Deism he 
asserted a living, spiritual presence, a God who is 
with us and in us, who is allied to humanity by 
an organic relationship. The result of this con- 
viction of the immanence of God implied the 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 81 



restoration to supreme place in his theology of 
the spiritual or essential Christ, who is above the 
conditions of time or space. Christ was the incar- 
nation of the Divine Consciousness as it exists in 
its fullness in God." " Schleiermacher contradic- 
ted the inmost principle of the Medieval or 
Calvinistic theologies, when he declared that in 
the earthly life of Christ there was to be seen the 
glorious exhibition of manifested Deity. Calvin 
had regarded the life of Christ in this world as 
the humiliation of the Son of God, in which the 
divine glory was concealed. Because Schleier- 
macher had also risen above the dualism of Latin 
theology, which made the human and the divine 
alien to each other, the Incarnation appeared once 
more as it had in Greek theology, — the actual 
manifestation of God in the human, so that Jesus 
of Nazareth became the revelation of God in His 
absolute glory. When as by a revelation, in the 
humble existence of the prophet of Nazareth the 
unveiled glory of the infinite God was discerned, 
the thought of ages was reversed." 

"Another principle which Schleiermacher re- 
garded in its larger relationships, and restated 
from a higher point of view, was the doctrine of 
election." He held that "humanity as a whole 
had been redeemed in Christ, that grace no less 
than law, was the dispensation under which all 
men everywhere are living." Lessing's idea of the 
education of the human race, Schleiermacher 



82 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



accepted and extended to an indefinite future and 
beyond the present life. 

What has been here collected interpretative of 
this eminent German apostle of Faith and Beason, 
gives but a glance at one or two of the characterizing 
marks of the revolution which has occurred in the 
modern development of Christianity. It, however, 
well illustrates the ever renewing advance of 
Christianity from form to form. " As truly as 
Augustine represented his age, Schleiermacher 
utters the truth to which all that is highest in 
modern Christianity continues to respond. His 
name is held in honor in Germany, as that of one 
from whom dates a 'new era in the history of 
theology. 5 The great German theologians who 
have come after him have been his disciples. 
Directly or indirectly, his influence has been 
telling upon every student of religious truth in 
America and in England." The tenets of the 
Eoman Catholic and Orthodox theology, — the 
doctrine of the Trinity as ordinarily taught, of 
total depravity, of the expiatory sacrifice of Christ 
and of endless suffering, — Schleiermacher found 
" neither in the Gospel nor in his heart. 3 ' He was 
the prophet of a form of Christianity sure to 
come, when a true idea of God finds acceptance in 
devout minds and hearts. Through him, the an- 
cient Christian doctrine of the Logos, transformed, 
transfigured, however, by man's maturer thought, 
had been renewed for the Christian Church. 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIAN IT y . 83 

MODERN UNITARIANISM. 

1. Farther Development of the Pro- 
test against the Reformed Theology. 
The Moral Reaction in America, from 
Calvinism. Ethical Idealism. William 
Ellery Charming, 1781-1842. 

The genesis of what is known as Modern Unitari- 
anism, is to be traced to the reaction consequent 
upon the re- affirmation in the Theology of the Re- 
formation, of the Augustinian doctrine of Human 
Nature and of the Divine Decrees. It was from the 
first, a moral protest, justified by a renewed sense 
of the inalienable right of the Reason to autonomy, 
which had been aroused in the Church at the time 
of the Renaissance. The moral protest directed 
the protest of the intellect. It easily found con- 
firmation in the words of the restored Bible. In 
argument, the seventeenth and eighteenth century 
Unitarians were as Scrij)tural as those whom they 
opposed. With perfect confidence in the " reason- 
ableness of Christianity/' as it was originally 
instituted, they sought to restore to the world the 
" Christianity of Christ." They aimed to do away 
with the mass of accretions by which, they 
honestly believed, the original divine simplicity of 
the Gospel had been concealed. These words of 
Dr. Priestley concerning Jesus, written towards 
the end of the eighteenth century, may be taken 
as a fair illustration of the reverent mood of the 
early Unitarian faith. st Our allegiance was given/' 



84 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



he said, " to the Saviour whose precepts we have 
obeyed, whose spirit we have breathed, whose 
religion we have defended and whose honours we 
have asserted, without making them to interfere 
with those of his Father and our Father, his God 
and our God, that supreme and awful Being, to 
whose will he was always perfectly submissive, and 
for whose unrivalled prerogatives he always 
showed the most ardent zeal." 

But the Unitarian movement, while always 
devoutly Christian, was specifically under the 
guidance of the moral impulses of human nature 
and the demands of the Reason. Gradually, in 
consequence, the representatives of Unitarian 
thought became more and more sympathetic with 
the growing Philosophy and Science of the present 
age. As in no other body of professed Christians, 
there is to be seen among them, as the years passed, 
a reflex of the increasing authority of the Reason. 
Whether consciously or not, they sought steadily 
to make a religious application and Christian 
interpretation of prevailing philosophic and 
scientific truth. They drew inspiration from an 
abiding confidence in the divine character of the 
Christian revelation, but this revelation rapidly 
disclosed itself to them as a revelation of the 
spirit rather than of the letter. 

Modern Unitarianism, so known, dates, we may 
say, from a memorable movement about eighty 
years ago among the Congregational Churches of 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 85 

America, of which. Dr. William Ellery Charming 
became the leading representative. 

Dr. Charming was reared in a home which was 
overshadowed by the theology of Calvin and 
Jonathan Edwards. His religious sense was in- 
tensely active and aspiring. As a college student 
he came across the writings of Hutcheson, a 
prominent opponent in the eighteenth century 
of the influence of Hobbes, the leading utilitarian 
and materialistic philosopher of the time, in Eng- 
land. In Hutcheson's treatise on u Beauty and 
Virtue" young Channing found "the fountain light 
of all his day, the master light of all his seeing/' — 
the Dignity of Human Nature. As though by a 
flash, he received the conviction that the human soul 
is by nature capable of devotion to absolute and 
universal good. Under this conviction, Channing's 
inherited faith was rapidly out-grown. His 
moral sense led him to rebel against the creed 
of Edwards and Calvin. He entered the Christian 
ministry, and, as years passed, he became known 
as a leader of the liberal movement which had 
long been gathering force among the New England 
Congregationalists. 

As far as Unitarian ism took form under Dr. 
Channing's guidance, it was as an exalted, ethical 
idealism, finding in Christianity the profoundest 
inspiration for the moral nature of man. In Dr. 
Channing's interpretation of Christianity there was 
a marked evolution. In his early writings, he 



86 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



believed himself to be an unquestioning student 
of the Christian scriptures, determined to find in 
them, "the will of God and the uncorrupted 
doctrines of Jesus." God is, in a real sense, the 
Father of the human soul, he wrote. Man, though 
sinful, is God's free child. "It might be pre- 
sumptuous, of course, to speak of man as being a 
partaker of the divine nature, did not the Script- 
ures employ this bold language, but this divine 
authorit}^ justifies us in saying that, in the 
strictest propriety of language, God is our Father." 
"Love to God is, therefore, but refined filial 
affection." c ' Life is God s plan for training human 
souls, the heirs of his own holiness and bles- 
sedness, for their inheritance. This truth must 
be recognized, and we must begin a career of 
worthy development, conscious of our powers 
and resolute to use them. Above all other truth 
is moral truth: it is our highest duty to seek that. 
Nowhere can that be found so beautiful and pure 
as in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Turn 
to that most affecting evidence of the worth of 
our nature, God's gift to us of his own Son. See 
how this only begotten Son, — whose position, 
though not revealed with precision is evidently 
one of peculiar intimacy with the Father, — see 
how he, by his relation to us, is our saviour, friend, 
guide, and giver of eternal life." In Dr. Channing's 
relation to the Bible, there developed in later 
years, a conscious interpretation of its records 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 87 

under the authority of the Reason. " In the Bible 
are clearly revealed the essential principles of 
Christianity, such as God's unity and paternal 
character, the equity and mercy of his administra- 
tion, and they accord perfectly with the discoveries 
of Nature and the surest dictates of the moral 
faculties. All passages of the Scriptures, there- 
fore, are to be interpreted in consistency with 
these fundamental truths. There must be a ra- 
tional interpretation of the Scriptures; the success, 
perhaps the very existence, of Christianity requires 
this service. There is a growing demand for a 
form of religion which will agree with the clear 
dictates of conscience and the plain manifestations 
the universe makes of God." Towards the end of 
his life, Dr. Channing's emphasis upon personal 
freedom became extreme. He proclaimed the 
Divinity of Human Nature. He confessed allegiance 
to a pure and universal Christianity, only. " What 
are the central truths to be taught?" he asked. 
"Is not the character of God as our moral Parent 
■ — the truth of truths ? What a quickening thought 
it is, what a ground of infinite hope, that God has 
given us a nature like his own, that the whole 
universe is formed as a field for its nutriment and 
growth! What an office is the preacher's, — to 
awaken the divine in man. In my books, I know 
I have given utterance to some great truths which 
were written not from tradition, but from deep 
conviction, from the depths of my soul, — may I 



88 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



not say from inspiration? I mean nothing mirac- 
ulous : does not God speak in us all ? I may 
sometimes use mystical language in my desire to 
express strongly the connection between man and 
God. We must look for God in our own souls. 
In the soul is the fountain of all divine truth. 
An outward revelation is only possible and in- 
telligible on the ground of conceptions and prin- 
ciples previously furnished by the soul. On what 
is universal and everlasting in human nature* 
Christianity is founded. For years I have felt a 
decreased interest in settling Christ's precise rank. 
The power of his character lies in his moral per- 
fection. I have attached less importance to the 
settlement of Christ's rank, since I have learned 
that all minds are of one family. Human and 
angelic natures are essentially one. Holding 
this doctrine, the humanitarian system does not 
shock me." Once Dr. Channing in old age, said 
to a friend, "I have at times experiences of the 
communion of mind and heart with the eternal 
Father, which Jesus seems to have had unceas- 
ingly, and which gives such unapproached, — I do 
not say unapproachable — dignity to his express- 
ions." 

As represented in Dr. Channing's thought, 
TJnitarianism gave to Christianity the character 
of an ethical ideal, springing out of a conscious- 
ness of spiritual association,— shall we say essential 
union ? — with God. This ideal has never been 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 89 

surpassed. Since Dr. Channing's day the Unitari- 
an movement lias been placed fully in touch 
with maturing Philosophy and Science, but it has 
not deserted, or lowered, that ideal. Unitarianism 
has in recent years accepted the results of modes 
of thought of which Dr. Channing could know 
nothing. It has, by some of its later representa- 
tives, been brought more intimately into contact 
with the historic consciousness of the Church 
Universal, but it remains still under the same 
ethical inspiration of which Dr. Channing was the 
aspiring prophet. 

2. American Transcen den talis in. 
Philosophic Rationalism and Religious 
Intuition. Pure Christianity the Ab- 
solute Religion. Continuity of Faith 
and Doctrine in the Evolution of the 
Church Universal. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
1804-1882. Theodore Parker, 1810-1860. Frederic 
Henry Hedge, 1805-1890. — The Transcendental 
movement brought to New England the influences 
which flowed over Christendom from emancipated 
Philosophy in Germany. The w r ork of Emerson, 
Parker and Hedge was their main channel. Spi- 
noza's idea of the Divine immanence, Lessing's 
discovery of the education of the human race, 
Kant's transcendentalism, Schelling's, Fichte's, 
Hegel's idealism, Schleiermacher's re-awakened 
and newly inspired Christian consciousness, the 
results of a scientific criticism of the Bible matur- 



90 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



ing in Germany, all were borne to America, and 

there received by some of the leaders of the 

Unitarian movement. Goethe had found rest in 

Spinoza's theological vision : — 

cc A God my worship may not win, 
Who lets the world about his finger spin, 
A thing extern ; my God must rule within, 
And whom I own for Father, God, Creator, 
Hold Nature in Himself, Himself in Nature," — 

wrote the great German poet, and his faith found 

response among some of the leaders of American 

Unitarianism. Coleridge, in England, had caught 

the new inspiration : — 

" 'Tis the sublime of men, 
Our noontide majesty, to know ourselves 
Parts and propositions of one wondrous whole. 

But 'tis God 

Diffused through all that doth make all one whole, 
God all in all. We and our Father one; "— 

and this inspiration was felt by many Unitarians 
to be a living Divine word. Wordsworth shared, 
also, in this discernment of the immanence of 
God:— 

I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime, 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of Man ; — 

and Wordsworth's feeling opened the spiritual 

eyes of many Unitarians to the infinite Presence. 

In a "Memoir" of his father, Eev. William C. 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 91 

Gannett thus describes those who were the agents 
of these new influences upon Unitarianism : — e - The 
Transcendentalists were simply the little New 
England quota in the great return of thinkers to 
Idealism after the long captivity to Sensationalism. 
As a school of critics they were the earliest in 
America, who boldly used the modern historic 
method in the study of the Bible. As a school of 
theology they dispensed with Mediation, in order to 
claim for the soul access direct to its Father. They 
have been credited with bringing the doctrine of 
the Holy Spirit into the Unitarian ' common sense 
in religion.' But more than the common doctrine 
of the Holy Spirit, and more than Orthodoxy 
compassed by its faith in Incarnation and the 
Helping Grace, their thought really implied. It 
implied a universal law of access and communion. 
It affirmed abiding contact of the finite and the 
Infinite, in virtue of the very nature of the soul 
and Over-SouL Inspiration fresh as well as old ; 
Revelation constant; Miracle but the human spirit's 
pinnacle of action; God the living God, not a deity 
then and there announcing himself with evidence 
of authenticity, but indwelling here and now in 
every presence." 

Under the deepening intuitions of Tran- 
scendentalism, Unitarians gradually transformed 
their conception of Christianity, more and more 
into a direct consciousness of essential com- 
munion of the human soul with "the Universal 



92 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



Soul." Ralph Waldo Emerson, the guiding 
voice of the new thought, spoke of this Univer- 
sal Soul, as the Reason in its most exalted 
manifestations. "It is not mine or thine or 
his, but we are its ; we are its property and 
men. And the blue sky in which the private 
earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and 
full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. 
That which, intellectually we call Reason, con- 
sidered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit 
is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself, and man, 
in all ages and countries, embodies it in his lan- 
guage, as the Father'' Of Jesus, Emerson said, 
" Alone in all histoiy, Jesus Christ estimated the 
greatness of man. He saw that God incarnates 
himself in man and evermore goes forth anew to 
take possession of his world. In how many 
churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man 
made sensible that he is an infinite Soul ; that the 
earth and heavens are passing into his mind ; that 
he is drinking from the Soul of God." 

Theodore Parker, the Luther of the New 
Christian Reformation, re-affirmed, with the most 
emphatic words, the revivified doctrine of the im- 
manence of God in the world and man, and the 
permanence thereby of essential Christianity. 
"Religion unites man with God till he thinks God's 
thought which is Truth ; feels God's feeling which 
is Love ; wills God's will which is eternal Right ; 
thus finding God in the sense wherein he is not 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 93 

far from any one of us ; becoming one with Him 
and so partaking of the Divine Nature." "Come 
to the plain words of Jesus of Nazareth, and 
Christianity is a very simple thing ; very simple. 
It is absolute pure Morality, absolute pure Re- 
ligion ; the love of God acting without let or 
hindrance. Its sanction is the voice of God in 
your heart ; the perpetual presence of Him who 
made us and the stars overhead ; Christ and the 
Father abiding in us." 

Dr. Frederic Henry Hedge, however, was the 
one among the leaders of the New Reformation, 
who felt most distinctly the nexus of Unitarianism 
with historic Christianity, and who interpreted it as 
but a new metamorphosis of the evolving Christian 
Gospel. Dr. Hedge, it has been said, "was pro- 
bably the ablest, deepest and most widely cultivat- 
ed intellect that the denomination has embraced. 
He was essentially a philosophical student and 
thinker." The future may show that he pen- 
etrated more deeply into the meaning of Religion 
as a historic fact, and saw r more clearly the 
real intent and consequent permanent worth of 
Christianity, than any other American leader of 
modern Unitarianism. Dr. Hedge had, in pre- 
eminence, the liberality which is associated with 
the most catholic knowledge. His mind absorbed 
the products of the maturest philosophy. He was 
familiar with religious history. He had ability to 
interpret the knowledge he acquired. He spoke 



94 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



always from a height whence he saw thoughts and 
events in farther reaching relations than those of 
their immediate surroundings. 

Under the "Transcendental" enthusiasm, Dr. 
Hedge kept a middle way and a sure footing. He 
felt, as we have seen, the strength and confidence 
which had been brought to religious faith by the 
restoration to Philosophy, through Spinoza, of the 
idea of the immanence of God in the universe, but 
he saw too the weakness of this idea, when it was 
so held as to destroy man's personal individuality. 
In his judgment, " Pantheism and Theism are not 
contradictory, but complementary, the one to the 
other." He was confident of the continuity of 
Religion from age to age, and it was impossible 
for him to break with Christianity and Christian 
history. ec A truer idea of the Christian dispensa- 
tion," he said, "is expressed in the word develop- 
ment. Christianity is not a fixed but a flowing 
quantity and power. It is not to be found com- 
plete and entire in any scripture, church or age, 
but unfolds itself successively through many 
scriptures, churches, and ages. It is not a totality 
but a process; a process of which the Church, — that 
is, Christian society, — is at once medium and ex- 
ponent, and ecclesiastical history the report." 
Dr. Hedge's sweep of vision is well shown in the 
following excerpt from one of his essays: — "Ke- 
ligion begins with the worship of things ; from 
fetishism it advances to personification of natural 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 95 



forces, and proceeds in the direction of personism, 
until some quickened and reflective soul, — in the 
language of theology some divinely-missioned 
individual, — through predominance in him of the 
moral sense, arrives at the truer conception of 
Deity as moral lawgiver, and adores the God of 
conscience above all Gods. Then commences, for 
the age and people in which such prophet appears, 
the reaction of the inner life ; the soul asserts its 
supremacy over Nature ; religion becomes internal, 
reflective, moral, and protestant. Christianity 
consummated that reaction, completely abolishing 
the Nature- worship and polytheism of the Greco- 
Roman world. The two main streams of ancient 
religion, Hellenism and Semitic monotheism, — 
themselves the debouchures respectively of other, 
elder, Phoenician, Egyptian, and Persian faiths, — 
found their confluence in the Christian dispensa- 
tion. Hellenism was completely merged and lost 
in it. Semitic monotheism, after delivering its 
'tribute wave/ has preserved an independent ex- 
istence, and still survives in the Judaism of the 'Dis- 
persion;' still flourishes in Mohammedism, one of 
the most wide spread of existing religions. This, 
and the elder religions of Central and Southern 
Asia, — Brahmanism and Buddhism, — still sway the 
major portion of the human race, but with such 
fixity, such incapacity of growth or effective 
reformation, as must needs neutralize their historic 
influence, if it does not abridge their duration. 



96 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



" Christianity is the solvent of other religions 
and may be regarded as the ultimate religion of 
man. In Protestant Christianity" (Protestant in 
the largest sense of the term) " religion has 
reached the extreme limit which divides it from 
pure Science ; in its latest development it seems 
to portend the union of the two. Further than 
this, Religion can not go in the direction of Reason, 
—in the rational apprehension of spiritual truth. 
There can be no progress out of Christianity into 
any new religion ; unless, indeed we give that 
name to some future dispensation of Science, ap- 
plying ascertained laws and scientific demonstra- 
tion to the ethical and social relations of man." 

Concerning the Person of Christ, Dr. Hedge 
wrote? u Nowhere, it seems to me, is the guiding 
Providence of God in history more conspicuous 
than it is in the wording of the final dictum of the 
Councils respecting the nature of Christ. The 
Chris tology of the Church was the growth of 
centuries. It was well for the Church, and well 
for humanity, that the Athanasian view prevailed 
as against the Arian and against the monophysite. 
The Catholic or Orthodox Christology is precisely 
that which, by the comprehensiveness and im- 
partiality of its statement, allows the largest liberty 
of speculation, and admits of the greatest diver- 
sity of view. It merely affirms what every one 
believes, who believes in Christianity at all, —that 
God and man wrought together in Christ for the 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 97 



regeneration of tinman kind. 

"The Council of Nicsea dates a new era in the 
history of human thought. God in actual contact 
with man, — God in man and man in God, — is the 
underlying idea of the Athanasian dogma which 
asserts that the Son is consubstantial with the 
Father. Probably, Athanasius did not perceive 
the real drift and scope of his doctrine. It was 
only of the Person of Christ that he affirmed 
substantial community with God. * * * * * 

"The fault of the Trinitarian doctrine, is not 
what it teaches, but what it omits to teach. It is 
not the assertion of the divinity in Christ, but the 
limitation of divine humanity to him, the implied 
exclusion of the rest of mankind from any part 
or lot in this matter. In the view of the Trinit- 
arian doctrine, mankind, at large, are separated 
from Christ, not only in degree but in kind ; they 
have not that oneness with him which he himself 
accorded to them in his prayer, ' That they all may 
be one ; as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, 
that they may be one in us. They have not that 
part in God which one of the New Testament 
writers affirms of Christians, at least, — 6 Called to 
be partakers of the divine nature.' " 

In the thought of this clear-sighted thinker, 
TJnitarianism was brought into visible and vital 
connection with the Christian Church Catholic, and 
appeared as the consummate product of a con- 
tinuous evolution of the essential Christianity. 



98 CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. ' 

The ancient faith and the emancipated Philosophy 
of the Modern Age flowed together. The Old and 
the New had become one. The new Christian 
Credo, so far as it was uttered in the mind of Dr. 
Hedge, is embodied in these eloquent words,— 

" I believe in the eve$ proceeding incarnation of 
the Spirit of God in human life. I believe in the 
ever proceeding transubstantiation of the world 
into the similitude of the Divine Idea. The 
Trinitarian doctrine was a crude attempt to for- 
mulate these truths but instead of their exponent 
became their grave, Trinitarian theology has 
lost its hold of advancing Christian thought, but 
the thing it embodied, Divine Humanity, across 
all the mists of theology is struggling into light 
Thus, practical Christianity fulfills the truth that 
was hidden in the absolute dogmas of the Church ; 
and thus, where ' the letter killeth, the spirit 
maketh alive.' " 

Under the influence of the Transcendental move- 
ment, Christianity as developed in Modern Unita- 
rianism became more and more identified with a 
conscious communion of the soul with the Divine 
Presence within itself, and with acceptance of 
Jesus Christ as the prototype of a divine life pos- 
sible for every man. This faith has never been 
authorized in a formal Unitarian creed. It has 
not yet wholly taken the place of so called, and 
mistakenly called, " Channing Unitarianism," but 
plainly enough, one . can see, it has given a deepen- 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 99 

ing harmony of tone to the words and writings of 
those who, in later years, have come to be repre- 
sentative of the Unitarian movement. At the 
present day, more than any other one power, it 
characterizes the implicit Unitarian creed. 

3. Christian Faith in Union, not only 
with Philosophic Rationalism, but tvitJi 
the Philosophy of Science. Present 
Unitarianism among the Forces pro- 
phetic of a Form of Christianity which 
sit all realize for Mankind the full Reli- 
gions Consciousness of 'Jesus Christ, and 
therein, Satisfaction for Man's Longing 
for Union with God. 

The Transcendental movement is not alone 
to be taken into the account, in setting forth 
Christianity as it has taken form among Unitarians. 
Science as well as Philosophy has been a potent 
force in guiding the Modern Age. Unitarianism 
has not been unmindful of the domain of truth 
which Science has opened up in the physical 
universe. This has been more and more recog- 
nized, and what it discloses for Keligion has been 
learned and taught. To Unitarians, all truth is 
divine ; and, to Unitarians, Christianity only the 
more really fulfills its purpose, when its transfigur- 
ing spirit embodies itself in all truth. Among 
Unitarians, therefore, the theology of Christianity 
has been, continuously, in recent years, enriched 
and magnified by the revelations of Science, and 



100 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



scientific truth lias been deepened and spiritualized 
by Christian Theology. Many quotations, from 
the works of representative Unitarians might be 
given to illustrate this fact, but it will suffice, as 
indicating the thought pervading them, to repeat 
a few passages from the sermon of Eev. Eichard 
Armstrong, of England, with which, a few months 
ago, he opened the National Conference of the 
Unitarian Churches of America. 

"The physical science of our time/ 5 he said, 
e 'has been unfolding to me her wondrous tale. 
And I find, as I look out on the world in the light 
of all this new knowledge, a pressure of God in 
up'on consciousness everywhere and always, sur- 
passing any vividness of the God-presence in any 
particular miracle which legend or myth has ever 
alleged. My imagination is wholly taken captive 
by this stupendous revelation of the God-force 
which modern conceptions of the Cosmos furnish. 
Through the whole beats the one life-force which 
is God, controlling every molecule in the petal of 
a daisy, in the meteoric ring of Saturn, in the 
remotest nebula that outskirts space, as though 
that molecule were the universe and all the rest a 
dream. When I realize that this energy is God, — 
for by no clear thinking can it be aught else, — 
God there, holding the stars in their places, God 
here, moving the sap along the leaf-veins of the 
maples, the one not great to Him, nor the other 
small, each worked with the like unbroken am- 



EVOLUTION AND METAMORPHOSES OF CHRISTIANITY. 101 

plitude of care, — then my soul is bowed down in 
wonder, and again lifted up in a mighty flood of 
joy, that God is here, that God is there, that every- 
where God cares and God attends, that not the 
vastest things are vast beyond his domination, 
that not the tiniest things are small beyond his 
perfect love and care. 

" And when my spirit is full of this revelation 
of surpassing wonder, with a bound, my heart 
leaps up to the recognition of the yet more 
glorious thing which it means besides ; that if He 
cares for these things and attends to them, much 
more must He have care and tendance for every 
conscious spirit that moves among the hills and 
plains. 

" The scientific account of the world-sustaining 
Energy has been the one thing which has given 
to me confidence, a priori, in that spiritual ap- 
prehensibility of God, which is the essence and 
core of Religion, above all, of the religion of 
Jesus of Nazareth." 



With this disclosure of Christianity realizing the 
faith of Jesus, in union with both the Science and 
the Philosophy of the present age, we ma} 7 leave 
our theme. Evidently Christianity belongs to the 
present and future as much as to any part of the 
past. "The words that I have spoken unto you 
are spirit and are life," said the Founder of our 
Faith. Those words have remained, and, as spirit, 



102 



CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY. 



they have been embodied, again and again, in the 
process of human affairs. The soul seeks personal 
realization of the everlasting gospel of the Father- 
hood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. Jesus 
announced that gospel and manifested it in life. In 
his own Person, he was prophetic of the goal 
towards which Humanity is moving. It was by no 
Chance, that the forces which had thitherto, apart, 
borne the world's civilization, received at their con- 
fluence eighteen hundred years ago, the Christian 
consciousness, and, thenceforward, carried it as 
their most precious possession, indeed, as their 
real reason for continued being. 



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